Communicating transactions

We propose a novel language construct called communicating transactions, obtained by dropping the isolation requirement from classical transactions, which can be used to model automatic error recovery in distributed systems. We extend CCS with this construct and give a simple semantics for the extended calculus, called TransCCS. We develop a behavioural theory which is sound and complete with respect to the may-testing preorder, and use it to prove interesting laws and reason compositionally about example systems. Finally, we prove that communicating transactions do not increase the observational power of processes; thus CCS equivalences are preserved in the extended language.