A Stable, Robust, and Lightweight Leader Election Service

The Leader Election Service

The Leader Election Service can be used to elect and maintain an operational leader among any subset

of application processes (called a group) in a system with random process crashes (and recoveries),

message losses, and message delays. If the group leader crashes, or is temporarily disconnected,

the service automatically re-elects a new leader and notifies the processes in the group of this change.

This service is written in C and is compatible with any POSIX compliant Linux/Unix.

Two versions of the service can be downloaded :

The most tolerant with regards to link failures : service-robust.zip

The DSN'08 paper is available here.

The Documentation

Documentation on how to compile, install, and use the service is available here.

Here is an example showing how to use the service interface : app.c

The Experimental Results

The experimental results of the three service versions considered in the DSN'08 paper can be found here.

License

The leader election service is free software. you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the

GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or

(at your option) any later version.

It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied

warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for

more details.