Warping the Edge: Where Instant Mobility in 5G Meets Stateful Applications

TL;DR

EdgeWarp enables low-latency, stateful mobile applications in 5G by proactively migrating application state during user mobility, significantly reducing downtime and maintaining performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces EdgeWarp, a novel system that proactively migrates stateful edge application data in 5G, addressing latency and downtime issues during user mobility.

Findings

Up to 15.4x reduction in application downtime during mobility

Effective early prediction of target edge hosts improves migration

Prioritized handover maintains latency-sensitive application performance

Abstract

Edge computing is considered a key paradigm for supporting real-time applications over 5G networks, as hosting applications at the network edge can substantially reduce delays. A significant fraction of real-time applications over 5G are expected to be highly mobile applications. However, one challenge with hosting mobile applications on the network edge is ensuring that users continue to get low latency as they move across different locations. This requires the support to handover clients to different edge sites with negligible application delays. However, many edge applications are stateful and can experience significant downtime during state migration over 5G. This paper addresses the problem of enabling stateful mobile edge applications in 5G networks. We first identify the key architectural issues and then propose a new system design, EdgeWarp, that mitigates delays during mobility through proactive application state migration. To enable this, we extend the existing edge data stores with the design of a novel two-step application state synchronization protocol, that leverages the early prediction of the target edge host. Additionally, EdgeWarp prioritizes the handover of latency-sensitive edge applications by communicating their latency requirements to the 5G control plane at the beginning of a data session. Our evaluation with real edge applications shows up to a 15.4x reduction in application downtime under mobility. We have made our anonymized code publicly accessible here.