Juncheng Fang: ImmortalChopper: Real-Time and Resilient Distributed Transactions in the Edge-Cloud

Emerging applications in the areas of real-time Internet of Things (IoT) and edge technologies (such as wearables, and mobile headsets) require fast processing and response times. This motivates the utilization of edge nodes for both processing and storage of data. In settings with a vast number of edge nodes—such as the case of smart cities and spaces—the state of the data is distributed across a large number of edge nodes. This makes it expensive to perform distributed transactions as these transactions would span edge nodes that are connected via less reliable and relatively slow network infrastructure. This makes it prohibitive to use existing protocols like 2PC that require rounds of communication across participants.

In this paper, we propose ImmortalChopper, a distributed transaction processing protocol that is designed for the edge-cloud environment. The goal of ImmortalChopper is to allow fast commitment of transactions on the edge without having to wait for distributed coordination. To achieve this, we build on the literature of Transaction Chopping. Transaction Chopping allows breaking a transaction into smaller hops. If the first hop commits, then, the rest of the transaction is guaranteed to commit. We utilize this feature to allow a transaction to commit from the closest edge node without having to wait for the rest of the processing of the other participating edge nodes. However, the direct use of Transaction Chopping is not suitable for the edge-cloud. This is because of the sporadic availability of edge nodes that leads to either blocking behavior during failures or the necessity to replicate each step which defies the purpose of using Chopping in our case. The innovation in ImmortalChopper is the introduction of the concept of ChopperGraph which utilizes lazy replication between edge and cloud nodes. This enables resilience to failures without the added synchronous overhead.

Bio:
Juncheng Fang is a 3rd-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at UC Irvine, supervised by Prof. Faisal Nawab. His current research focuses on blockchain, distributed systems, and edge cloud.