  Separation Logic (SL) with inductive definitions is a natural formalism for
specifying complex recursive data structures, used in compositional
verification of programs manipulating such structures. The key ingredient of
any automated verification procedure based on SL is the decidability of the
entailment problem. In this work, we reduce the entailment problem for a
non-trivial subset of SL describing trees (and beyond) to the language
inclusion of tree automata (TA). Our reduction provides tight complexity bounds
for the problem and shows that entailment in our fragment is EXPTIME-complete.
For practical purposes, we leverage from recent advances in automata theory,
such as inclusion checking for non-deterministic TA avoiding explicit
determinization. We implemented our method and present promising preliminary
experimental results.
