Complete open manifolds and horofunctions

Let M be a complete open Riemannian manifold. When the sectional curvature $K_M$ of M is nonpositive, Gromov has defined, in his lectures [3], the ideal boundary of M, and used it to study the geometric structure of M. In a Hadamard manifold, a simply connected manifold with nonpositive sectional curvature, a point at infinity can be defined as an equivalence class of rays. He proved many interesting theorems using this definition of ideal boundary and the so-called Tit's metric on it. He also suggested a counterpart to this for nonnegative curvature case. This idea has been taken up by Kasue to study the structure of complete open manifolds with asympttically nonnegative curvature [14]. Motivated by these works, we will define an idela boundary of a general noncompact manifold M, and study its structure.