Fault-tolerant distributed algorithm for election in complete networks

Electron in asynchronous complete networks is considered for the case in which the links may fail intermittently and undetectably. Undetectable link failure is consistent with the standard model of distributed algorithms in which link delays can be arbitrary but finite. An algorithm is given that correctly solves the problem when the links fail before or during the execution of the algorithm. If n is the number of nodes in the network, f the maximum number of fault links, and r a design parameter, the algorithm uses no more than O(nrf+(nr/(r-1) log(n/(r-1)f))) messages, runs in time O(n/(r-1)) f, and uses at most O(log|T |) bits per message, where |T| is the cardinality of the set of node identifiers