Ziziphus: Scalable Data Management Across Byzantine Edge Servers

Edge computing while bringing computation and data closer to users in order to improve response time, distributes edge servers in wide area networks resulting in increased communication latency between the servers. Synchronizing globally distributed edge servers, especially in the presence of Byzantine servers, becomes costly due to the high communication complexity of Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. In this paper, we present Ziziphus, a geo-distributed system that partitions edge servers into fault-tolerant zones where each zone processes transactions initiated by nearby clients locally. Global synchronization among zones is required only in special situations, e.g., migration of clients from one zone to another. On the one hand, the two-level architecture of Ziziphus confines the malicious behavior of nodes within zones requiring a much cheaper protocol at the top level for global synchronization. On the other hand, Ziziphus processes local transactions within zones by edge servers closer to clients resulting in enhanced performance. Ziziphus further introduces zone clusters to enhance scalability where instead of running global synchronization among all zones, only zones of a single cluster are synchronized.