Time and Fairness in a Process Algebra with Non-blocking Reading

We introduce the first process algebra with non-blocking reading actions for modelling con-current asynchronous systems, and we do it in two different ways: one is more flexible, the otheris simpler since it needs only one type of transitions. We study the impact this new kind ofactions have on fairness, liveness and the timing of systems, using Dekker’s mutual exclusionalgorithm we already considered in [4] as running example. Regarding some actions as reading,this algorithm satisfies MUTEX liveness already under the assumption of fairness of actions.We demonstrate an interesting correspondence between liveness and the catastrophic cycles thatwe introduced in [7] when studying the performance of pipelining. Finally, our previous resulton the correspondence between timing and fairness [4] scales up to the extended language.