Equational Properties of Mobile Ambients

  • Andy Gordon ,
  • Luca Cardelli

FoSSaCS 1999 International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structure |

Published by Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

A shortened version of this paper appears in the proceedings of the conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 22 - 26 March 1999. The proceedings is published by Springer Verlag as a volume of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Publication | Publication

The ambient calculus is a process calculus for describing mobile computation. We develop a theory of Morris-style contextual equivalence for proving properties of mobile ambients. We prove a context lemma that allows derivation of contextual equivalences by considering contexts of a particular limited form, rather than all arbitrary contexts. We give an activity lemma that characterises the possible interactions between a process and a context. We prove several examples of contextual equivalence. The proofs depend on characterising reductions in the ambient calculus in terms of a labelled transition system.