An Investigation into Distributed Channel Mobility Support for Communicating Process Architectures

Localised mobile channel support is now a feature of Communicating Process Architecture (CPA) based frameworks, from JCSP and C++CSP to occamπ. Distributed mobile channel support has also been attempted in JCSP Networking and occam-π via the pony framework, although the capabilities of these two separate approaches is limited and has not led to the widespread usage of distributed mobile channel primitives. In this paper, an initial investigation into possible models that can support distributed channel mobility are presented and analysed for features such as transmission time, robustness and reachability. The goal of this work is to discover a set of models which can be used for channel mobility and also supported within the single unified protocol for distributed CPA frameworks. From the analysis presented in this paper, it has been determined that there are models which can be implemented to support channel end mobility within a single unified protocol which provide suitable capabilities for certain application scenarios.