Department of Computing Science
Chalmers University of Technology
4pm Thursday 3rd November 2005
Room 2511, JCMB, King's Buildings
Computers often send messages broadcast over ethernets, and point-to-point between them: globally asynchronous, locally synchronous. This paradigm inspires the new primitive calculus presented here, MBS (mobile broadcasting systems). MBS processes communicate by broadcast, but only in rooms, and move between rooms at unspecified speeds. A broadcaster is heard instantly by everyone else in the room, but by no one outside. Priorities are attached to speech and to exits from rooms, and rooms can be blocked awaiting a message; these primitives suffice to synchronise broadcasting and moving. MBS borrows the treatment of names from the \pi-calculus, but the latter's ``get/put b on channel a'' becomes in MBS ``go to a and hear/say b''.
This is work in progress.