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
