Name-passing in an ambient-like calculus and its proof using spatial logic

Abstract

This paper studies a restricted version of the ambient calculus, a process model for mobile and distributed computation. We only allow single-threaded ambients migrating in a network of immobile ambients, exchanging payloads, and delivering them. With this restriction, we arrive at a calculus free from grave interferences. In previous works, this is only possible by sophisticated type systems. We focus on the expressiveness of the restricted calculus. We show that we can still repeat Zimmer's encoding of name-passing in our calculus. Moreover, we prove a stronger operational correspondence result than Zimmer's. The proof takes advantage on a specification about the spatial structure and process distributions of the encoding that are invariant to reductions, using a novel spatial logic.