Structural Rewriting in the Pi-Calculus

ABSTRACT. We consider reduction in the synchronous pi-calculus with replication, without sums. Usual definitions of reduction in the pi-calculus use a closure w.r.t. structural congruence of processes. In this paper we operationalize structural congruence by providing a reduction relation for pi-processes which also performs necessary structural conversions explicitly by rewrite rules. As we show, a subset of structural congruence axioms is sufficient. We show that our rewrite strategy is equivalent to the usual strategy including structural congruence w.r.t. the observation of barbs and thus w.r.t. may- and should-testing equivalence in the pi-calculus.