A termination detection protocol for use in mobile ad hoc networks

As devices become smaller and wireless networking technologies improve, the popularity of mobile computing continues to rise. In today's world, many consider devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops as essential tools. As these and other devices become increasingly independent of the wired infrastructure, new kinds of applications that assume an ad hoc network infrastructure are being deployed. Their development forces software engineers to revisit well understood problems in a setting in which existing solutions are no longer working. This paper illustrates one such attempt by focusing on an important problem in distributed computing, termination detection in diffusing computations, in an ad hoc network environment. We formulate an algorithmic solution amenable to usage in mobile ad hoc networks. Along the way. we highlight several important software engineering concerns one must address and design strategies one might employ in a mobile setting.