Electing a leader is a fundamental task in distributed computations. Many coordination problems, such as the access to a shared resource, and the resulting inefficiencies, can be avoided by relying on a leader. This paper presents SELECT, a leader election protocol for wireless networks where nodes communicate over a shared medium. SELECT is very robust in two respects. First, the protocol is self-stabilizing in the sense that it converges to a correct solution from any possible initial network state (e.g., where no or multiple nodes consider themselves a leader). This is an appealing property, especially for dynamic networks. Second, the described protocol is resilient against a powerful reactive jammer that blocks a significant fraction of all communication rounds. The reactive model is general and of interest beyond jamming (e.g., in the context of co-existing networks). The paper also reports on experimental results obtained from our simulation framework which allows us to study convergence behavior under different types of adversarial jammers.

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