An Efficient Election Protocol in a Mobile Environment

The Election paradigm can be used as a building block in many practical problems such as group communication, atomic commit and replicated data management where a protocol coordinator might be useful. The problem has been widely studied in the research community since one reason for this wide interest is that many distributed protocols need an election protocol. However, despite its usefulness, to our knowledge there is no work that has been devoted to this problem in a mobile computing environment. Mobile systems are more prone to failures than conventional distributed systems. Solving election in such an environment requires from a set of mobile hosts to choose a mobile host or a fixed host based on the their priority despite failures of both mobile computing and/or fixed hosts. In this paper, we describe a solution to the election problem from mobile computing systems. This solution is based on the Garcia Molina’s Bully algorithm.