On the Distributability of Mobile Ambients

Kirstin Peters
(TU Berlin)
Uwe Nestmann
(TU Berlin)

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.

In Jorge A. Pérez and Simone Tini: Proceedings Combined 25th International Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency and 15th Workshop on Structural Operational Semantics (EXPRESS/SOS 2018), Beijing, China, September 3, 2018, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 276, pp. 104–121.
Published: 24th August 2018.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.276.9 bibtex PDF
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