Survivors in Leader Election Algorithms

Abstract

We consider the number of survivors in a broad class of fair leader election algorithms after a number of election rounds. We give sufficient conditions for the number of survivors to converge to a product of independent identically distributed random variables. The number of terms in the product is determined by the round number considered. Each individual term in the product is a limit of a scaled random variable associated with the splitting protocol. The proof is established via convergence (to 0) of the first-order Wasserstein distance from the product limit. In a broader context, the paper is a case study of a class of stochastic recursive equations. We give two illustrative examples, one with binomial splitting protocol (for which we show that a normalized version is asymptotically Gaussian) and one with uniform splitting protocol.