Brief Announcement: Toward Uniform Content-Oblivious Leader Election on General Graphs

Fabian Frei; Ran Gelles; Ahmed Ghazy; Alexandre Nolin

doi:10.1145/3796701.3815949

Brief Announcement: Toward Uniform Content-Oblivious Leader Election on General Graphs

Fabian Frei
, Ran Gelles
, Ahmed Ghazy
, Alexandre Nolin

Bar-Ilan University - The Alexander Kofkin Faculty of Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Télécom SudParis
Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review

Abstract

In the content-oblivious model, communication is limited to sending content-less pulses over asynchronous channels. Despite this extreme restriction, Censor-Hillel et al. (Dist. Comp., 2023) showed that any computation can be simulated on 2-edge-connected graphs, assuming a designated leader. Subsequent work investigated the necessity of this assumption. Frei et al. (DISC 2024, Dist. Comp. 2026) and Chalopin et al. (DISC 2025) designed content-oblivious leader-election algorithms for rings, thereby eliminating the need for an initial leader. Non-uniform leader election is possible on 2-edge-connected graphs (Chalopin et al., DISC 2025).We extend uniform leader election beyond rings to a significantly broader class of topologies. Specifically, we present a uniform content-oblivious leader-election algorithm for Eulerian graphs with message complexity O(|E| · IDmax), where |E| is the number of edges, and IDmax is the largest identifier in the network. While the feasibility of uniform content-oblivious leader election in arbitrary 2-edge-connected graphs remains open, our result substantially narrows the gap between rings and general 2-edge-connected graphs.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	PODC 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	235-238
Number of pages	4
ISBN (Electronic)	9798400725128
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3796701.3815949
State	Published - 1 Jul 2026
Event	45th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2026 - Egham, United Kingdom Duration: 6 Jul 2026 → 10 Jul 2026

Publication series

Name	Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Conference

Conference	45th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2026
Country/Territory	United Kingdom
City	Egham
Period	6/07/26 → 10/07/26

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Keywords

Content-Oblivious Computation
Eulerian Networks
Fully Defective Networks
Leader Election
OR Protocol

Access to Document

10.1145/3796701.3815949

Cite this

Frei, F., Gelles, R., Ghazy, A., & Nolin, A. (2026). Brief Announcement: Toward Uniform Content-Oblivious Leader Election on General Graphs. In PODC 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (pp. 235-238). (Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796701.3815949

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abstract = "In the content-oblivious model, communication is limited to sending content-less pulses over asynchronous channels. Despite this extreme restriction, Censor-Hillel et al. (Dist. Comp., 2023) showed that any computation can be simulated on 2-edge-connected graphs, assuming a designated leader. Subsequent work investigated the necessity of this assumption. Frei et al. (DISC 2024, Dist. Comp. 2026) and Chalopin et al. (DISC 2025) designed content-oblivious leader-election algorithms for rings, thereby eliminating the need for an initial leader. Non-uniform leader election is possible on 2-edge-connected graphs (Chalopin et al., DISC 2025).We extend uniform leader election beyond rings to a significantly broader class of topologies. Specifically, we present a uniform content-oblivious leader-election algorithm for Eulerian graphs with message complexity O(|E| · IDmax), where |E| is the number of edges, and IDmax is the largest identifier in the network. While the feasibility of uniform content-oblivious leader election in arbitrary 2-edge-connected graphs remains open, our result substantially narrows the gap between rings and general 2-edge-connected graphs.",

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Frei, F, Gelles, R, Ghazy, A & Nolin, A 2026, Brief Announcement: Toward Uniform Content-Oblivious Leader Election on General Graphs. in PODC 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 235-238, 45th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2026, Egham, United Kingdom, 6/07/26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796701.3815949

Brief Announcement: Toward Uniform Content-Oblivious Leader Election on General Graphs. / Frei, Fabian; Gelles, Ran; Ghazy, Ahmed et al.
PODC 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. Association for Computing Machinery, 2026. p. 235-238 (Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review

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Frei F, Gelles R, Ghazy A, Nolin A. Brief Announcement: Toward Uniform Content-Oblivious Leader Election on General Graphs. In PODC 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing. Association for Computing Machinery. 2026. p. 235-238. (Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing). doi: 10.1145/3796701.3815949

Brief Announcement: Toward Uniform Content-Oblivious Leader Election on General Graphs

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Access to Document

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Cite this