Stateful process migration for edge computing applications

Low-latency is an advantage of edge computing. To utilize this advantage, a server-side application communicating with user equipment (UE) should be migrated from a server executing the application to a server near the UE's destination. However, the downtime caused by this migration can be a problem for applications that require ultra-low latency. To reduce the downtime, we propose a novel method for migrating only processes that contain UE-specific states, and not the entire application. The method introduces conversion of inter-process communication channels to enable communication continuity of the migrated processes. Finally, we show that the downtime for our method is shorter than that for VM migration and container migration.