Leader election in a personal distributed environment

A personal distributed environment (PDE) is the global set of inter-networked communication enabled devices that a user possesses, and replaces the single terminal of the traditional personal communication model. The PDE requires a device to host the local device management entity, which coordinates the operation of these devices. The selection of this device should occur without any user interaction, and should consider the performance capabilities of the various devices. This paper presents an algorithm that selects a leader on the basis of performance capabilities, and is able to change the order of importance of the capabilities according to current circumstances