Many of today’s message-passing systems not only require messages to be exchanged in a certain order but also to happen at a certain time or within a certain time window . Such correctness conditions are particularly prominent in Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time systems applications, which interface with hardware devices that come with inherent timing constraints. Verifying compliance of such systems with the intended timed protocol is challenged by their heterogeneity —ruling out any verification method that relies on the system to be implemented in one common language, let alone in a high-level and typed programming language. To address this challenge, this paper contributes a logical relation to verify that its inhabitants (the applications and hardware devices to be proved correct) comply with the given timed protocol. To cater to the systems’ heterogeneity, the logical relation is entirely semantic , lifting the requirement that its inhabitants are syntactically well-typed. A semantic approach enables two modes of use of the logical relation for program verification: (i) once-and-for-all verification of an arbitrary well-typed application, given a type system, and (ii) per-instance verification of a specific application / hardware device ( a.k.a ., foreign code). To facilitate mode (i) , the paper develops a refinement type system for expressing timed message-passing protocols and proves that any well-typed program inhabits the logical relation (fundamental theorem). A type checker for the refinement type system has been implemented in Rust, using an SMT solver to check satisfiability of timing constraints. Then, the paper demonstrates both modes of use based on a small case study of a smart home system for monitoring air quality, consisting of a controller application and various environment sensors.

We develop a session types framework for implementing and validating rate-based message passing systems in Internet of Things (IoT) domains. To model the indefinite repetition present in many embedded and IoT systems, we introduce a timed process calculus with a periodic recursion primitive. This allows us to model rate-based computations and communications inherent to these application domains. We introduce a definition of rate-based session types in a binary session types setting and a new compatibility relationship, which we call rate compatibility . Programs which type-check enjoy the standard session types guarantees as well as rate error freedom—meaning processes which exchanges messages do so at the same rate . Rate compatibility is defined through a new notion of type expansion, a relation that allows communication between processes of differing periods by synthesizing and checking a common superperiod type. We prove type preservation and rate error freedom for our system and show a decidable method for type checking based on computing superperiods for a collection of processes. We implement a prototype of our type system including rate compatibility via an embedding into the native type system of Rust. We apply this framework to a range of examples from our target domain such as Android software sensors, wearable devices, and sound processing. Our framework is used to implement a heart rate sensor application that runs on a commercially available smartwatch.

We develop a session types based framework for implementing and validating rate-based message passing systems in Internet of Things (IoT) domains. To model the indefinite repetition present in many embedded and IoT systems, we introduce a timed process calculus with a periodic recursion primitive. This allows us to model rate-based computations and communications inherent to these application domains. We introduce a definition of rate based session types in a binary session types setting and a new compatibility relationship, which we call rate compatibility. Programs which type check enjoy the standard session types guarantees as well as rate error freedom --- meaning processes which exchanges messages do so at the same rate. Rate compatibility is defined through a new notion of type expansion, a relation that allows communication between processes of differing periods by synthesizing and checking a common superperiod type. We prove type preservation and rate error freedom for our system, and show a decidable method for type checking based on computing superperiods for a collection of processes. We implement a prototype of our type system including rate compatibility via an embedding into the native type system of Rust. We apply this framework to a range of examples from our target domain such as Android software sensors, wearable devices, and sound processing.

Abstract In this paper, we introduce a tiered-priority scheme for a synchronous message-passing language with support for selective communication and first-class communication protocols. Crucially, our scheme allows higher priority threads to communicate with lower priority threads, providing the ability to express programs that would be rejected by classic priority mechanisms that disallow any (potentially) blocking interactions between threads of differing priorities. We formalize our scheme in a novel semantic framework featuring a collection of actions to represent possible communications. Utilizing our formalism, we prove several important and desirable properties of our priority scheme. We also provide a prototype implementation of our tiered-priority scheme capable of expressing Concurrent ML and built in the MLton SML compiler and runtime. We evaluate the viability of our implementation through three case studies: a prioritized buyer-seller protocol and predictable shutdown mechanisms in the Swerve web server and eXene windowing toolkit. Our experiments show that priority can be easily added to existing CML programs without degrading performance. Our system exhibits negligible overheads on more modest workloads.