Designing and Evaluating Fault-tolerant Leader Election Algorithms

Fault-tolerant leader election is a basic building block for dependable distributed computing, since it allows coordinating decisions among replicas such that they remain consistent. Indeed, several fault-tolerant agreement protocols rely on an eventual leader election service. This problem has been initially studied in crash-prone systems, and more recently in other failure scenarios, e.g., crash-recovery, omission and Byzantine. Most of the previous works have considered those failure models individually. This paper presents our ongoing work on the design and evaluation of distributed leader election algorithms in systems prone to both crashrecoveries and message omissions.