Loquat: A framework for large-scale actor communication on edge networks

We provide a lightweight decentralized publish-subscribe framework for supporting large-scale actor communication on edge networks. Our framework, called Loquat, does not depend on any reliable central nodes (e.g., data centers), provides reliability in the face of massive node failures and network partitioning, and provides scalability as the number of nodes increases. We consider that high reliability, i.e., that send operations reach close to 100% of live destination nodes, is a critical property for communication frameworks on edge networks. But reliability is difficult to achieve in a scalable way on edge networks because of the network's dynamicity, i.e., frequent node failures and partitioning. For example, both Internet of Things networks and mobile phone networks consist of devices that are often offline. To achieve reliability, our framework is based on two hybrid gossip algorithms, namely HyParView and Plumtree. Hybrid gossip algorithms combine gossip with other distributed algorithms to achieve both efficiency and high resilience. Our current implementation is written in Erlang and has demonstrated scalability up to 1024 nodes in Amazon's cloud computing environment.