Deciding Subtyping for Asynchronous Multiparty Sessions

Abstract: Multiparty session types (MSTs) are a type-based approach to verifying communication protocols, represented as global types in the framework. We present a precise subtyping relation for asynchronous MSTs with communicating state machines (CSMs) as implementation model. We address two problems: when can a local implementation safely substitute another, and when does an arbitrary CSM implement a global type? We define safety with respect to a given global type, in terms of subprotocol fidelity and deadlock freedom. Our implementation model subsumes existing work which considers local types with restricted choice. We exploit the connection between MST subtyping and refinement to formulate concise conditions that are directly checkable on the candidate implementations, and use them to show that both problems are decidable in polynomial time.