This paper focuses on compact deterministic self-stabilizing solutions for
the leader election problem. When the protocol is required to be \emph{silent}
(i.e., when communication content remains fixed from some point in time during
any execution), there exists a lower bound of Omega(\log n) bits of memory per
node participating to the leader election (where n denotes the number of nodes
in the system). This lower bound holds even in rings. We present a new
deterministic (non-silent) self-stabilizing protocol for n-node rings that uses
only O(\log\log n) memory bits per node, and stabilizes in O(n\log^2 n) rounds.
Our protocol has several attractive features that make it suitable for
practical purposes. First, the communication model fits with the model used by
existing compilers for real networks. Second, the size of the ring (or any
upper bound on this size) needs not to be known by any node. Third, the node
identifiers can be of various sizes. Finally, no synchrony assumption, besides
a weakly fair scheduler, is assumed. Therefore, our result shows that, perhaps
surprisingly, trading silence for exponential improvement in term of memory
space does not come at a high cost regarding stabilization time or minimal
assumptions