Deterministic Leader Election in O(D+\log n) Time with Messages of Size O(1)

This paper presents a distributed algorithm, called ST T , for electing deterministically a leader in an arbitrary network, assuming processors have unique identifiers of size O(log n), where n is the number of processors. It elects a leader in O(D + log n) rounds, where D is the diameter of the network, with messages of size O(1). Thus it has a bit round complexity of O(D + log n). This substantially improves upon the best known algorithm whose bit round complexity is O(D log n). In fact, using the lower bound by Kutten et al. [26] and a result of Dinitz and Solomon [17], we show that the bit round complexity of ST T is optimal (up to a constant factor), which is a step forward in understanding the interplay between time and message optimality for the election problem. Our algorithm requires no knowledge on the graph such as n or D.