On the expressiveness of π-calculus for encoding mobile ambients

We investigate the expressiveness of two classical distributed paradigms by defining the first encoding of the pure mobile ambient calculus into the synchronous π-calculus. Our encoding, whose correctness has been proved by relying on the notion of operational correspondence, shows how the hierarchical ambient structure can be reformulated within a flat channel interconnection amongst independent processes, without centralised control. To easily handle the computation for simulating a capability, we introduce the notions of simulating trace (representing the computation that a π-calculus process has to execute to mimic a capability) and of aborting trace (representing the computation that a π-calculus process executes when the simulation of a capability cannot succeed). Thus, the encoding may introduce loops, but, as it will be shown, the number of steps of any trace, therefore of any aborting trace, is limited, and the number of states of the transition system of the encoding processes still remains finite. In particular, an aborting trace makes a sort of backtracking, leaving the involved sub-processes in the same starting configurations. We also discuss two run-time support methods to make these loops harmless at execution time. Our work defines a relatively simple, direct, and precise translation that reproduces the ambient structure by means of channel links, and keeps track of the dissolving of an ambient.

RPO semantics for mobile ambients

In this paper we focus on the synthesis of labelled transition systems (LTSs) for process calculi using Mobile Ambients (MAs) as a testbed. Our proposal is based on a graphical encoding: a process is mapped into a graph equipped with interfaces such that the denotation is fully abstract with respect to the standard structural congruence. Graphs with interfaces are amenable to the synthesis mechanism based on borrowed contexts (BCs), which is an instance of relative pushouts (RPOs). The BC mechanism allows the effective construction of an LTS that has graphs with interfaces as states and labels, and such that the associated bisimilarity is a congruence. We focus here on the analysis of an LTS over processes as graphs with interfaces: we use the LTS on graphs to recover an LTS directly defined over the structure of MA processes and define a set of SOS inference rules capturing the same operational semantics.