Near-Optimal Time-Energy Trade-Offs for Deterministic Leader Election

We consider the energy complexity of the leader election problem in the single-hop radio network model, where each device has a unique identifier in $\{1, 2, \ldots, N\}$. Energy is a scarce resource for small battery-powered devices. For such devices, most of the energy is often spent on communication, not on computation. To approximate the actual energy cost, the energy complexity of an algorithm is defined as the maximum over all devices of the number of time slots where the device transmits or listens. Much progress has been made in understanding the energy complexity of leader election in radio networks, but very little is known about the trade-off between time and energy. $\textbf{Time-energy trade-off:}$ For any $k \geq \log \log N$, we show that a leader among at most $n$ devices can be elected deterministically in $O(n^{1+\epsilon}) + O(k \cdot N^{1/k})$ time and $O(k)$ energy if each device can simultaneously transmit and listen, where $\epsilon > 0$ is any small constant. This improves upon the previous $O(N)$-time $O(\log \log N)$-energy algorithm by Chang et al. [STOC 2017]. We provide lower bounds to show that the time-energy trade-off of our algorithm is near-optimal. $\textbf{Dense instances:}$ For the dense instances where the number of devices is $n = \Theta(N)$, we design a deterministic leader election algorithm using only $O(1)$ energy. This improves upon the $O(\log^* N)$-energy algorithm by Jurdzi\'{n}ski et al. [PODC 2002] and the $O(\alpha(N))$-energy algorithm by Chang et al. [STOC 2017]. More specifically, we show that the optimal deterministic energy complexity of leader election is $\Theta\left(\max\left\{1, \log \frac{N}{n}\right\}\right)$ if the devices cannot simultaneously transmit and listen, and it is $\Theta\left(\max\left\{1, \log \log \frac{N}{n}\right\}\right)$ if they can.