Leader Election and Expressiveness
Iain Phillips

Abstract. Choosing a leader process in a network of processes is a classical
problem of distributed computing.  The work of Bougé and Palamidessi
has shown that we can regard the ability to perform leader election in
a symmetric and distributed fashion as a measure of the expressive
power of process languages.  We discuss the results which have been
obtained following this line of research, and compare them with
alternative approaches.  In particular, we consider ambient calculi
(languages which allow mobile code to be transported in containers
called "ambients").  We also describe current investigation (with
MohammadReza Mousavi) into the properties of general process languages
which determine whether leader election is possible.  (Joint work with
Maria Grazia Vigliotti)