Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2007
We define BACI(Boxed Ambients with Communication Interfaces), an ambientcalculus with a flexible communication policy. Traditionally, typed ambientcalculi have a fixed communication policy determining the kind of informationthat can be exchanged with a parent ambient, even though mobility changes theparent. BACI lifts that restriction, allowing differentcommunication policies with different parents during computation. Furthermore,BACI separates communication and mobility by making thechannels of communication between ambients explicit. In contrast with othertyped ambient calculi where communication policies are global, each ambient inBACI is equipped with a description of the communicationpolicies ruling its information exchange with parent and child ambients. Thecommunication policies of ambients increase when they move: more precisely, whenan ambient enters another ambient, the entering ambient and the host ambient canexchange their communication ports and agree on the kind of information to beexchanged. This information is recorded locally in both ambients.
We show the type-soundness of BACI, proving that it satisfies thesubject reduction property, and we study its behavioural semantics by means of alabelled transition system.