Mobility control via passports

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Abstract

Dπ is a simple distributed extension of the π-calculus in which agents are explicitly located, and may use an explicit migration construct to move between locations.

In this paper, we introduce passports to control those migrations; in order to gain access to a location agents are now expected to show some credentials, granted by the destination location. Passports are tied to specific locations, from which migration is permitted. We describe a type system for these passports, which includes a novel use of dependent types, and prove that well-typing enforces the desired behaviour in migrating processes.

Passports allow locations to control incoming processes. This induces major modifications to the observations which can be made of agent-based systems. Using the type system we describe these observations, and use them to build a loyal notion of observational equivalence for this setting. Finally we provide a complete proof technique in the form of a bisimilarity for establishing equivalences between systems.

Keywords

Process calculus
Control of agent migrations
Distributed computation
Observational equivalence

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