A process calculus for mobile ad hoc networks

  • Authors:

  • Anu Singh;C. R. Ramakrishnan;Scott A. Smolka

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY;Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY;Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY

  • Venue:
  • COORDINATION'08 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Coordination models and languages
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We present the ω-calculus, a process calculus for formally modeling and reasoning about Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Networks (MANETs) and their protocols. The ω-calculus naturally captures essential characteristics of MANETs, including the ability of a MANET node to broadcast a message to any other node within its physical transmission range (and no others), and to move in and out of the transmission range of other nodes in the network. A key feature of the ω-calculus is the separation of a node's communication and computational behavior, described by an ω-process, from the description of its physical transmission range, referred to as an ω-process interface. Our main technical results are as follows. We give a formal operational semantics of the ω-calculus in terms of labeled transition systems and show that the state reachability problem is decidable for finite-control ω-processes. We also prove that the ω-calculus is a conservative extension of the π-calculus, and that late bisimulation (appropriately lifted from the π-calculus to the ω-calculus) is a congruence. Congruence results are also established for a weak version of late bisimulation, which abstracts away from two types of internal actions: τ -actions, as in the π-calculus, and µ-actions, signaling node movement. Finally, we illustrate the practical utility of the calculus by developing and analyzing a formal model of a leader-election protocol for MANETs.