Selective Hearing: An Approach to Distributed, Eventually Consistent Edge Computation

Abstract

We present a new programming model for large-scale mobile and "Internet of Things" style distributed applications. The model consists of two layers: a language layer based on the Lasp language with a runtime layer based on epidemic broadcast. The Lasp layer provides deterministic coordination-free computation primitives based on conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs). The epidemic broadcast layer is based on the Plumtree protocol. It provides a communication framework where clients may only have a partial view of membership and may not want to participate in or have knowledge of all active computations. We motivate the new model with a nontrivial mobile application, a distributed ad counter, and we give the model's formal semantics.