JCSP-Poison: Safe Termination of CSP Process Networks

Abstract. This paper presents a novel technique for safe partial or complete process network termination. The idea is to have two types of termination messages / poison: LocalPoison and GlobalPoison. Injecting GlobalPoison into a process network results in a safe termination of the whole process network. In contrast, injected LocalPoi-son only terminates all processes until it is filtered out by Poison-Filtering Channels. This allows the creation of termination domains inside a process network. To make handling of a termination message easy, it is delivered as an exception and not as a normal message. The necessary Poisonable- and Poison-Filtering-Channels have been modelled in CSP and checked using FDR. A proof of concept implementation for Communicating Sequential Processes for Java (JCSP) has been developed and refined. Previously, JCSP offered no safe way to terminate the process network. When the user terminated the program, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) simply stops all threads (processes), without giving the processes the chance to perform clean up operations. A similar technique is used to perform partial termination of process networks in JCSP, making it unsafe as well. The technique presented in this paper is not limited to JCSP, but can easily be ported to other CSP environments. Partial process network termi-nation can be applied in the area of Software Defined Radio (SDR), because SDR systems need to be able to change their signal processing algorithms during runtime