An Election Protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Distributed Systems

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 ad hoc computing environment. Mobile ad hoc systems are more prone to failures than conventional distributed systems. Solving election in such an environment requires from a set of mobile nodes to choose a unique node as a leader based on its priority despite failures or disconnections of mobile nodes. In this paper, we describe a solution to the election problem from mobile ad hoc computing systems. This solution is based on the group membership detection algorithm.