Liveness of communicating transactions

Abstract

We study liveness and safety in the context of CCS extended with communicating transactions, a construct we recently proposed to model automatic error recovery in distributed systems. We show that fair-testing and may-testing capture the right notions of liveness and safety in this setting, and argue that must-testing imposes too strong a requirement in the presence of transactions. We develop a sound and complete theory of fair-testing in terms of CCS-like tree failures and show that, compared to CCS, communicating transactions provide increased distinguishing power to the observer. We also show that weak bisimilarity is a sound, though incomplete, proof technique for both may- and fair-testing. To the best of our knowledge this is the first semantic treatment of liveness in the presence of transactions. We exhibit the usefulness of our theory by proving illuminating liveness laws and simple but non-trivial examples. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.