The content-oblivious model, introduced by Censor-Hillel, Cohen, Gelles, and Sela (PODC 2022; Distributed Computing 2023), captures an extremely weak form of communication where nodes can only send asynchronous, content-less pulses. They showed that in 2-edge-connected networks, any distributed algorithm can be simulated in the content-oblivious model, provided that a unique leader is designated a priori. Subsequent works of Frei, Gelles, Ghazy, and Nolin (DISC 2024) and Chalopin et al. (DISC 2025) developed content-oblivious leader election algorithms, first for unoriented rings and then for general 2-edge-connected graphs. These results establish that all graph problems are solvable in content-oblivious, 2-edge-connected networks. Much less is known about networks that are not 2-edge-connected. Censor-Hillel, Cohen, Gelles, and Sela showed that no non-constant function f(x,y) can be computed correctly by two parties using content-oblivious communication over a single edge, where one party holds x and the other holds y. This seemingly ruled out many natural graph problems on non-2-edge-connected graphs. In this work, we show that, with the knowledge of network topology G, leader election is possible in a wide range of graphs. Our main contributions are as follows: Impossibility: Graphs symmetric about an edge admit no randomized terminating leader election algorithm, even when nodes have unique identifiers and full knowledge of G. Leader election algorithms: Trees that are not symmetric about any edge admit a quiescently terminating leader election algorithm with topology knowledge, even in anonymous networks, using O(n²) messages, where n is the number of nodes. Moreover, even-diameter trees admit a terminating leader election given only the knowledge of the network diameter D = 2r, with message complexity O(nr). Necessity of topology knowledge: In the family of graphs 𝒢 = {P₃, P₅}, both the 3-path P₃ and the 5-path P₅ admit a quiescently terminating leader election if nodes know the topology exactly. However, if nodes only know that the underlying topology belongs to 𝒢, then terminating leader election is impossible.

In the content-oblivious (CO) model, proposed by Censor-Hillel et al. (PODC 2022 & Distributed Computing 2023), processes operate in an asynchronous network and communicate solely through pulses: zero-size messages that carry no information beyond their mere existence.

We study leader election in oriented ring networks under a content-oblivious asynchronous message-passing model in which an adversary may arbitrarily corrupt message contents. This highly stringent model captures extreme communication unreliability.

Censor-Hillel, Cohen, Gelles, and Sela (PODC 2022 & Distributed Computing 2023) studied fully-defective asynchronous networks, where communication channels may arbitrarily corrupt messages. The model is equivalent to content-oblivious computation, where nodes communicate solely via pulses. They showed that if the network is 2-edge-connected, then any algorithm for a noiseless setting can be simulated in the fully-defective setting; otherwise, no non-trivial computation is possible in the fully-defective setting. However, their simulation requires a predesignated leader, which they conjectured to be necessary for any non-trivial content-oblivious task. Recently, Frei, Gelles, Ghazy, and Nolin (DISC 2024) refuted this conjecture for the special case of oriented ring topology. They designed two asynchronous content-oblivious leader election algorithms with message complexity O(n ⋅ ID_{max}), where n is the number of nodes and ID_{max} is the maximum ID. The first algorithm stabilizes in unoriented rings without termination detection. The second algorithm quiescently terminates in oriented rings, thus enabling the execution of the simulation algorithm after leader election. In this work, we present two results: General 2-edge-connected topologies: First, we show an asynchronous content-oblivious leader election algorithm that quiescently terminates in any 2-edge-connected network with message complexity O(m ⋅ N ⋅ ID_{min}), where m is the number of edges, N is a known upper bound on the number of nodes, and ID_{min} is the smallest ID. Combined with the above simulation, this result shows that whenever a size bound N is known, any noiseless algorithm can be simulated in the fully-defective model without a preselected leader, fully refuting the conjecture. Unoriented rings: We then show that the knowledge of N can be dropped in unoriented ring topologies by presenting a quiescently terminating election algorithm with message complexity O(n ⋅ ID_{max}) that matches the previous bound. Consequently, this result constitutes a strict improvement over the previous state of the art and shows that, on rings, fully-defective and noiseless communication are computationally equivalent, with no additional assumptions.

In this paper, we study the leader election problem in oriented ring networks under content-oblivious asynchronous message-passing systems, where an adversary may arbitrarily corrupt message contents. Frei et al. (DISC 2024) recently presented a uniform terminating leader election algorithm for oriented rings in this setting, with message complexity O(nIDmax) on a ring of size n, where IDmax is the largest identifier in the system. In this paper, we investigate the message complexity of leader election in this model, showing that no uniform algorithm can solve the problem if each process is limited to sending a constant number of messages in one direction. Interestingly, this limitation hinges on the uniformity assumption. In the non-uniform setting – where processes know an upper bound U ≥ n on the ring size – we present an algorithm with message complexity O(nUIDmin), in which each process sends O(UIDmin) messages clockwise and only three messages counter-clockwise. Here, IDmin is the smallest identifier in the system. This dependence on the identifiers compares favorably with the dependence on IDmax of Frei et al. (DISC 2024). We also show a non-uniform algorithm where each process sends O(U log IDmin) messages in one direction and O(log IDmin) in the other. The factor log IDmin is optimal, matching the lower bound of Frei et al. (DISC 2024). Finally, in the anonymous setting, we propose a randomized algorithm where each process sends only O(log2 U) messages, with a success probability of 1 − U−c