Network Conscious π-calculus: A Concurrent Semantics

Traditional process calculi usually abstract away from network details, modeling only communication over shared channels. They, however, seem inadequate to describe new network architectures, such as Software Defined Networks [Openflow foundation website, http://www.openflow.org/], where programs are allowed to manipulate the infrastructure. In this paper we present a network conscious, proper extension of the π-calculus: we add connector names and the primitives to handle them, and we provide a concurrent semantics. The extension to connector names is natural and seamless, since they are handled in full analogy with ordinary names. Our observations are multisets of routing paths through which sent and received data are transported. However, restricted connector names do not appear in the observations, which thus can possibly be as abstract as in the π-calculus. Finally, we show that bisimilarity is a congruence, and this property holds also for the concurrent version of the π-calculus.