A message-optimal algorithm for distributed termination detection

Abstract

Termination detection is among the important problems in distributed processing systems. Several algorithms have been proposed to solve the problem. However, these solutions are inefficient in terms of the number of messages used in the worst case. Chandy and Misra have shown that a lower bound on the message complexity of the termination detection problem is the number of messages used by the underlying computation. We establish a new lower bound on the message complexity of the termination detection problem and present a new algorithm for the termination detection problem which achieves these lower bounds simultaneously.