On Asynchronous Session Semantics

This paper studies a behavioural theory of the π-calculus with session types under the fundamental principles of the practice of distributed computing — asynchronous communication which is order-preserving inside each connection (session), augmented with asynchronous inspection of events (message arrivals). A new theory of bisimulations is introduced, distinct from either standard asynchronous or synchronous bisimilarity, accurately capturing the semantic nature of session-based asynchronously communicating processes augmented with event primitives. The bisimilarity coincides with the reduction-closed barbed congruence. We examine its properties and compare them with existing semantics. Using the behavioural theory, we verify that the program transformation of multithreaded into event-driven session based processes, using Lauer-Needham duality, is type and semantic preserving

On the preciseness of subtyping in session types

Subtyping in concurrency has been extensively studied since early 1990s as one of the most interesting issues in type theory. The correctness of subtyping relations has been usually provided as the soundness for type safety. The converse direction, the completeness, has been largely ignored in spite of its usefulness to define the greatest subtyping relation ensuring type safety. This paper formalises preciseness (i.e. both soundness and completeness) of subtyping for mobile processes and studies it for the synchronous and the asynchronous session calculi. We first prove that the well-known session subtyping, the branching-selection subtyping, is sound and complete for the synchronous calculus. Next we show that in the asynchronous calculus, this subtyping is incomplete for type-safety: that is, there exist session types T and S such that T can safely be considered as a subtype of S, but T ≤ S is not derivable by the subtyping. We then propose an asynchronous sub-typing system which is sound and complete for the asynchronous calculus. The method gives a general guidance to design rigorous channel-based subtypings respecting desired safety properties

On the Distributability of Mobile Ambients

Modern society is dependent on distributed software systems and to verify them different modelling languages such as mobile ambients were developed. To analyse the quality of mobile ambients as a good foundational model for distributed computation, we analyse the level of synchronisation between distributed components that they can express. Therefore, we rely on earlier established synchronisation patterns. It turns out that mobile ambients are not fully distributed, because they can express enough synchronisation to express a synchronisation pattern called M. However, they can express strictly less synchronisation than the standard pi-calculus. For this reason, we can show that there is no good and distributability-preserving encoding from the standard pi-calculus into mobile ambients and also no such encoding from mobile ambients into the join-calculus, i.e., the expressive power of mobile ambients is in between these languages. Finally, we discuss how these results can be used to obtain a fully distributed variant of mobile ambients.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2018, arXiv:1808.08071. Conference version of arXiv:1808.0159

The Buffered \pi-Calculus: A Model for Concurrent Languages

Message-passing based concurrent languages are widely used in developing large distributed and coordination systems. This paper presents the buffered $\pi$-calculus --- a variant of the $\pi$-calculus where channel names are classified into buffered and unbuffered: communication along buffered channels is asynchronous, and remains synchronous along unbuffered channels. We show that the buffered $\pi$-calculus can be fully simulated in the polyadic $\pi$-calculus with respect to strong bisimulation. In contrast to the $\pi$-calculus which is hard to use in practice, the new language enables easy and clear modeling of practical concurrent languages. We encode two real-world concurrent languages in the buffered $\pi$-calculus: the (core) Go language and the (Core) Erlang. Both encodings are fully abstract with respect to weak bisimulations

On the Expressiveness of Intensional Communication

The expressiveness of communication primitives has been explored in a common framework based on the pi-calculus by considering four features: synchronism (asynchronous vs synchronous), arity (monadic vs polyadic data), communication medium (shared dataspaces vs channel-based), and pattern-matching (binding to a name vs testing name equality). Here pattern-matching is generalised to account for terms with internal structure such as in recent calculi like Spi calculi, Concurrent Pattern Calculus and Psi calculi. This paper explores intensionality upon terms, in particular communication primitives that can match upon both names and structures. By means of possibility/impossibility of encodings, this paper shows that intensionality alone can encode synchronism, arity, communication-medium, and pattern-matching, yet no combination of these without intensionality can encode any intensional language.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2014, arXiv:1408.127

An Operational Petri Net Semantics for the Join-Calculus

We present a concurrent operational Petri net semantics for the join-calculus, a process calculus for specifying concurrent and distributed systems. There often is a gap between system specifications and the actual implementations caused by synchrony assumptions on the specification side and asynchronously interacting components in implementations. The join-calculus is promising to reduce this gap by providing an abstract specification language which is asynchronously distributable. Classical process semantics establish an implicit order of actually independent actions, by means of an interleaving. So does the semantics of the join-calculus. To capture such independent actions, step-based semantics, e.g., as defined on Petri nets, are employed. Our Petri net semantics for the join-calculus induces step-behavior in a natural way. We prove our semantics behaviorally equivalent to the original join-calculus semantics by means of a bisimulation. We discuss how join specific assumptions influence an existing notion of distributability based on Petri nets.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2012, arXiv:1208.244