CESSNA: Resilient Edge-Computing

The introduction of computational resources at the network edge has moved us from a Client-Server model to a Client-Edge-Server model. By offloading computation from clients and/or servers, this approach can reduce response latency, backbone bandwidth, and computational requirements on clients. While this is an attractive paradigm for many applications, particularly 5G mobile networks and IoT devices, it raises the question of how one can design such a client-edge-server system to tolerate edge failures and client mobility. The key challenge is to ensure correctness when the edge processing is stateful (so the processing depends on state it has previously seen from the client and/or server). In this paper we propose an initial design for meeting this challenge called Client-Edge-Server for Stateful Network Applications (CESSNA).