A survey on leader election protocols for radio networks

Abstract

A radio network is a distributed system with no central arbiter, consisting of n radio transceivers, referred to as stations. We assume that the stations are identical and cannot be distinguished by serial or manufacturing number. The leader election problem asks to designate one of the stations as leader. In this work, we focus on single-channel, single-hop radio networks. We assume that time is slotted and all transmissions occur at slot boundaries. In each time slot the stations trans-init on the channel with some probability until, eventually, one of the stations is the declared leader. The history of a station up to time slot t is captured by the status of the channel and the transmission activity of the station in each of the t time slots. From the perspective of how much of the history information is used, we identify three types of leader election protocols for single-channel, single-hop radio networks: oblivious if no history information is used, uniform if only the history of the status of the channel is used, and nonuniform if the stations use both the status of channel and the transmission activity. The main goal of this paper is to provide a survey of recent leader election protocols for radio networks.