Distributed Leader Election in P2P Systems for Dynamic Sets

The collection of and search for location information is

a core component in many pervasive and mobile computing

applications. In distributed collaboration scenarios this location

data is collected by different entities, e.g., users with

GPS enabled mobile phones. Instead of using a centralized

service for managing this distributed dynamic location

data, we use a peer-to-peer data structure, the so-called distributed

space partitioning tree (DSPT). A DSPT is a general

use peer-to-peer data structure, similar to distributed

hash tables (DHTs), that allows publishing, updating of,

and searching for dynamic sets. In this paper we present

an efficient distributed leader election algorithm that can

be used in DSPTs to eliminate redundant network traffic.