Describing Mobile Computations with Path Vectors.
Philippe Quéinnec, Mamoun Filali, Philippe Mauran, Gérard Padiou · 2000
. We introduce a model for diffusing computations, along with a representation for the structure of such computations. This representation appears to be well-fitted to the description of mobile agents: it does not require any beforehand knowledge about the communication medium topology and it can cope with a dynamic topology, to which sites can be added or removed and need not be permanently connected to the network. The migration and cloning of mobile agents are seen as a diffusing computation, and we model this computation as a set of distributed paths associated to the different threads of control. The structure of the computation is captured by means of path vectors. A path vector labels an agent migration corresponding to the spreading of the path, and catches causal relationships resulting from the control flow: a path vector accounts for the migration history of a mobile agent. Path vectors are used to assess properties on the computation. As an example, we develop...