Leader Election in Rings with Bounded Multiplicity (Short Paper)

We study leader election in unidirectional rings of homonym processes that have no a priori knowledge on the number of processes. We show that message-terminating leader election is impossible for any class of rings \(\mathcal K_k\) with bounded multiplicity \(k \ge 2\). However, we show that process-terminating leader election is possible in the sub-class \(\mathcal U^* \cap \mathcal K_k\), where \(\mathcal U^*\) is the class of rings which contain a process with a unique label.