Anonymous Stabilizing Leader Election using a Network Sequencer

In this paper, we present an anonymous, stable, communication efficient, stabilizing leader election algorithm that works using anonymous communication primitives. The algorithm offers properties similar to that of the Omega failure detector, with the added property of totally ordering the sequence of proposed leaders. The algorithm does not need to know beforehand the identity or the number of processes in the system, and operates using a constant amount of memory. We present the algorithm, discuss performance issues and optimizations and present experimental results of a prototype implementation.