MAG$$\pi $$: Types for Failure-Prone Communication

Abstract

AbstractMultiparty Session Types(MPST) are a typing discipline for communication-centric systems, guaranteeing communication safety, deadlock freedom and protocol compliance. Several works have emerged which model failures and introduce fault-tolerance techniques. However, such works often make assumptions on the underlying network,e.g., assuming TCP-based communication where messages are guaranteed to be delivered; or adopting centralised reliable nodes and ad-hoc notions of reliability; or only addressing a single kind of failure, such as node crashes. In this work, we develop MAG$$\pi $$π—a Multiparty, Asynchronous and Generalised$$\pi $$π-calculus, which is thefirst language and type systemto accommodate in unison: (i) the widest range of non-Byzantine faults, includingmessage loss, delaysandreordering;crashandlink failures; andnetwork partitioning; (ii) a novel and most general notion ofreliability, taking into account the viewpoint ofeachparticipant in the protocol; (iii) a spectrum of network assumptions from the lowest UDP-based network programming to the TCP-based application level. We prove subject reduction and session fidelity; process properties (deadlock freedom, termination,etc.); failure-handling safety and reliability adherence.