On termination detection protocols in a mobile distributed computing environment

Abstract

Incorporating mobile components into a distributed system has posed new challenges to the design of distributed computation. This paper studies a fundamental problem in distributed computing, the termination detection problem, in a mobile environment. Two types of termination detection protocols already exist: the diffusion-based schemes and the weight-throwing schemes, that are designed for traditional static distributed systems. We propose a hybrid scheme by combining these two protocols together. The scheme can better exploit the communication hierarchy (in terms of wired and wireless bandwidths) and can pave the gaps of computation and communication capability between static and mobile hosts, thus more scalable to larger distributed systems. Simulation results are presented, which show the advantage of the hybrid scheme over existing schemes.