In this work we study the problem of counting the number of mobile hosts in mobile networks. Mobile networks aim to provide
continuous network connectivity to users regardless of their location. Host mobility introduces a number of new features and
requirements for the distributed algorithms. In this case, the use of conventional distributed algorithms from mobile hosts
results in a number of serious drawbacks. The two tier principle has been proposed (see [
2]) to overcome these problems. The use of this principle for structuring distributed algorithms for mobile hosts means that
the computation and communications requirements of an algorithm is borne by the static hosts to the maximum extend possible.
The Distributed Systems Platform (DSP) is a software platform that has been designed for the implementation, simulation and
testing of distributed protocols. It offers a set of subtools which permit the researcher and the protocol designer to work
under a familiar graphical and algorithmic environment. The use of DSP gave us considerable input and permitted us to experimentally
test the two tier principle for the counting problem of mobile hosts. Moreover it helped us to design new distributed algorithms
for this problem, improve them and experimentally test them, validating their performance under various conditions.