A Calculus of Mobility and Communication for Ubiquitous Computing

We propose a Calculus of Mobility and Communication (CMC) for the modelling of mobility, communication and context-awareness in the setting of ubiquitous computing. CMC is an ambient calculus with the in and out capabilities of Cardelli and Gordon's Mobile Ambients. The calculus has a new form of global communication similar to that in Milner's CCS. In CMC an ambient is tagged with a set of ports that agents executing inside the ambient are allowed to communicate on. It also has a new context-awareness feature that allows ambients to query their location. We present reduction semantics and labelled transition system semantics of CMC and prove that the semantics coincide. A new notion of behavioural equivalence is given by defining capability barbed bisimulation and congruence which is proved to coincide with barbed bisimulation congruence. The expressiveness of the calculus is illustrated by two case studies.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Space-Aware Ambients and Processes

Resource control has attracted increasing interest in foundational research on distributed systems. This paper focuses on space control and develops an analysis of space usage in the context of an ambient-like calculus with bounded capacities and weighed processes, where migration and activation require space. A type system complements the dynamics of the calculus by providing static guarantees that the intended capacity bounds are preserved throughout the computation

A Calculus of Bounded Capacities

Resource control has attracted increasing interest in foundational research on distributed systems. This paper focuses on space control and develops an analysis of space usage in the context of an ambient-like calculus with bounded capacities and weighed processes, where migration and activation require space. A type system complements the dynamics of the calculus by providing static guarantees that the intended capacity bounds are preserved throughout the computation

A graph semantics for a variant of the ambient calculus more adequate for modeling SOC

In this paper we present a graph semantics of a variant of the well known ambient calculus. The main change of our variant is to extract the mobility commands of the original calculus from the ambient topology. Similar to a previous work of ours, we prove that our encoding have good properties. We strongly believe that this variant would allow us to integrate our graph semantics of our mobile calculus with previous work of us in service oriented computing (SOC). Basically, our work on SOC develops a new graph transformation system which we call temporal symbolic graphs. This new graph formalism is used to give semantics to a design language for SOC developed in an european project, but it could also be used in connection with other approaches for modeling or specifying service systems.Postprint (published version

Separability in the Ambient Logic

The \it{Ambient Logic} (AL) has been proposed for expressing properties of process mobility in the calculus of Mobile Ambients (MA), and as a basis for query languages on semistructured data. We study some basic questions concerning the discriminating power of AL, focusing on the equivalence on processes induced by the logic $(=_L>)$. As underlying calculi besides MA we consider a subcalculus in which an image-finiteness condition holds and that we prove to be Turing complete. Synchronous variants of these calculi are studied as well. In these calculi, we provide two operational characterisations of $_=L$: a coinductive one (as a form of bisimilarity) and an inductive one (based on structual properties of processes). After showing $_=L$ to be stricly finer than barbed congruence, we establish axiomatisations of $_=L$ on the subcalculus of MA (both the asynchronous and the synchronous version), enabling us to relate $_=L$ to structural congruence. We also present some (un)decidability results that are related to the above separation properties for AL: the undecidability of $_=L$ on MA and its decidability on the subcalculus.Comment: logical methods in computer science, 44 page

A Type Inference Algorithm for Secure Ambients

We consider a type discipline for the Ambient Calculus that associates ambients with security levels and constrains them to be traversed by or opened in ambients of higher security clearance only. We present a bottom-up algorithm that, given an untyped process $P$, computes a minimal set of constraints on security levels such that all actions during runs of $P$ are performed without violating the security level priorities. Such an algorithm appears to be a prerequisite to use type systems to ensure security properties in the web scenario

Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"

According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners. • The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another. • The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time. • The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered. The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems. This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative. We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration

Adequacy Issues in Reactive Systems: Barbed Semantics for Mobile Ambients

Reactive systems represent a meta-framework aimed at deriving behavioral congruences for those specification formalisms whose operational semantics is provided by rewriting rules. The aim of this thesis is to address one of the main issues of the framework, concerning the adequacy of the standard observational semantics (the IPO and the saturated one) in modelling the concrete semantics of actual formalisms. The problem is that IPO-bisimilarity (obtained considering only minimal labels) is often too discriminating, while the saturated one (via all labels) may be too coarse, and intermediate proposals should then be put forward. We then introduce a more expressive semantics for reactive systems which, thanks to its flexibility, allows for recasting a wide variety of observational, bisimulation-based equivalences. In particular, we propose suitable notions of barbed and weak barbed semantics for reactive systems, and an efficient characterization of them through the IPO-transition systems. We also propose a novel, more general behavioural equivalence: L-bisimilarity, which is able to recast both its IPO and saturated counterparts, as well as the barbed one. The equivalence is parametric with respect to a set L of reactive systems labels, and it is shown that under mild conditions on L it is a congruence. In order to provide a suitable test-bed, we instantiate our proposal over the asynchronous CCS and, most importantly, over the mobile ambients calculus, whose semantics is still in a flux