Causal computational complexity of distributed processes

Abstract

This article studies the complexity of π-calculus processes with respect to the quantity of transitions caused by an incoming message. First, we propose a typing system for integrating Bellantoni and Cook's characterisation of polytime computable functions into Deng and Sangiorgi's typing system for termination. We then define computational complexity of distributed messages based on Degano and Priami's causal semantics, which identifies the dependency between interleaved transitions. Next, we apply a necessary syntactic flow analysis to typable processes to ensure a computational bound on the number of distributed messages. We prove that our analysis is decidable; sound in the sense that it guarantees that the total number of messages causally dependent of an input request received from the outside is bounded by a polynomial of the content of this request; and complete, meaning that each polynomial recursive function can be computed by a typable process.