Encoding Distributed Areas and Local Communication into the pi-Calculus

We show how the π-calculus can express local communications within a distributed system, through an encoding of the local area π-calculus, an enriched system that explicitly represents names which are known universally but always refer to local information. Our translation replaces point-to-point communication with a system of shared local ethers; we prove that this preserves and reflects process behaviour. We give an example based on an internet service daemon, and investigate some limitations of the encoding.