A virtual machine for the ambient calculus

Mobile computing is the use of a wide area network as an integral part of a computer system. In spite of similarities with distributed computing, research in the area has shown that there are substantial differences between these two disciplines. As a result, theoretical and practical tools from distributed computing can not be used in mobile computing. There is a great body of work in the area of formal models for mobile computing, including in particular the ambient calculus, but little of this work has translated into the development of programming languages for mobile computing, which inhibits experimentation and practical use. This paper describes the design and implementation of an abstract machine for execution of the ambient calculus, which we call MAC. The implementation of the machine includes a tool to help visualize reduction steps in the ambient calculus, for debugging or educational purposes. The contribution of this work is that the availability of this machine aids in the search for adequate programming languages for mobile computing.