The essence of synchronisation in asynchronous data flow programming

We discuss the aspect of synchronisation in the language design of the asynchronous dataflow language S-Net. Synchronisation is a crucial aspect of any coordination approach. S-Net provides a particularly simple construct, the synchrocell. The synchrocell is actually two simple to meet regular synchronisation demands itself. We show that in conjunction with other language feature, S-Net synchrocells can effectively do the job. Moreover, we argue that their simplistic design in fact is a necessary prerequisite to implement even more interesting scenarios, for which we outline ways of efficient implementation.