Boxed Ambients with Communication Interfaces

We define BACI (Boxed Ambients with Communication Interfaces), an ambient calculus allowing a liberal communication policy. Each ambient carries its local view of the topic of conversation (the type of the information being exchanged) with parents and children that will condition where it is allowed to stay or migrate to and which ambients may be allowed to enter it. The topic of conversation view of ambients can dynamically change during migration. BACI is flexible enough to allow different topics of conversation between an ambient and different parents, without compromising type-safety: it uses port names for communication and ambient names for mobility. Capabilities and co-capabilities exchange port names and run-time typing information to control mobility. We show the type-soundness of BACI proving that it satisfies the subject reduction property. Moreover we study its behavioural semantics by means of a labelled transition system.