A Message-Passing Architecture without Public Ids Using Send-to-Behavior

Abstract

We explore a novel model of computation based on nodes that have no public addresses (ids). We define nodes as concurrent, message-passing computational entities in an abstract communication medium, similar to the Actor model, but with all public node ids elided. Instead, drawing inspiration from biological systems, we postulate a send-to-behavior language construct to enable anonymous one-way communication. A behavior, defined as a function of input to actions, is also an intensional definition of the subset of nodes that express it. Sending to a behavior is defined to deliver the message to one or more nodes that implement that behavior.