Crash-resilient time-free eventual leadership

Abstract

Leader-based protocols rest on a primitive able to provide the processes with the same unique leader. Such protocols are very common in distributed computing to solve synchronization or coordination problems. Unfortunately, providing such a primitive is far from being trivial in asynchronous distributed systems prone to process crashes. (It is even impossible in fault-prone purely asynchronous systems.) To circumvent this difficulty, several protocols have been proposed that build a leader facility on top of an asynchronous distributed system enriched with synchrony assumptions. This paper consider another approach to build a leader facility, namely, it considers a behavioral property on the flow of messages that are exchanged. This property has the noteworthy feature not to involve timing assumptions. Two protocols based on this time-free property that implement a leader primitive are described. The first one uses potentially unbounded counters, while the second one (which is a little more involved) requires only finite memory. These protocols rely on simple design principles that make them attractive, easy to understand and provably correct.