Abstract. Leader election protocols have been intensively studied in distributed computing, mostly in the static setting. However, it remains a challenge to design and analyze these protocols in the dynamic setting, due to its high uncertainty, where typical properties include the average steps of electing a leader eventually, the scalability etc. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based approach for analyzing leader election protocols of dynamic systems based on probabilistic model checking. In particular, we employ a leading probabilistic model checker, PRISM, to simulate representative protocol executions. We also relax the assumptions of the original model to cover unreliable channels which requires the introduction of probability to our model. The experiments confirm the feasibility of our approach.

Leader election protocols are fundamental for coordination problems-such as consensus-in distributed computing. Recently, hierarchical leader election protocols have been proposed for dynamic systems where processes can dynamically join and leave, and no process has global information. However, quantitative analysis of such protocols is generally lacking. In this paper, we present a probabilistic model checking based approach to verify quantitative properties of these protocols. Particularly, we employ the compositional technique in the style of assume-guarantee reasoning such that the sub-protocols for each of the two layers are verified separately and the correctness of the whole protocol is guaranteed by the assume-guarantee rules. Moreover, within this framework we also augment the proposed model with additional features such as rewards. This allows the analysis of time or energy consumption of the protocol. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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