Top k-leader election in wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to elect the top K leaders among the nodes in a wireless ad hoc network. Leader election is a fundamental distributed coordination problem arising from many applications, e.g. token regeneration, directory service. However, there is no deterministic algorithm proposed for electing k leaders. In our algorithm, election is based on the weight values of the nodes, which can represent any performance related attribute such as the node's battery power, computational capabilities etc. To achieve message efficiency, coordinator nodes are first selected locally and then the coordinator nodes collect the weight information of other nodes using a diffusing computation approach. The coordinator nodes collaborate with each other to further reduce the message cost. Node failures are also considered in our design. The simulation results show that, compared with a naive solution, our proposed algorithm can elect top K leaders with much less message cost.