A Termination Detection Protocol and Its Formal Verification

Abstract The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, we present a new and very simple protocol, which solves the termination detection protocol in any undirected communication network. The solution is based on symmetric knowledge: all processors are programmed equally, and an upper bound of the size of the network is the only global knowledge the processors need to know. Second, we formally prove the correctness of the protocol. The nature of the protocol allows us to describe all computations of the protocol as a language. This formalism introduces a new way of proving the correctness of the distributed algorithm.