Edge computing is a recent computing paradigm that brings cloud services closer to the client. Among other features, edge computing offers extremely low client/server latencies. To consistently provide such low latencies, services should run on edge nodes that are physically as close as possible to their clients. Thus, when the physical location of a client changes, a service should migrate between edge nodes to maintain proximity. Differently from cloud nodes, edge nodes integrate CPUs of different Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs), hence a program natively compiled for a given ISA cannot migrate to a server equipped with a CPU of a different ISA. This hinders migration to the closest node.

We introduce H-Container, a system that migrates natively compiled containerized applications across compute nodes featuring CPUs of different ISAs. H-Container advances over existing heterogeneous-ISA migration systems by being (a) highly compatible – no user’s source-code nor compiler toolchain modifications are needed; (b) easily deployable – fully implemented in user space, thus without any OS or hypervisor dependency, and (c) largely Linux-compliant – it can migrate most Linux software, including server applications and dynamically linked binaries. H-Container targets Linux and its already-compiled executables, adopts LLVM, extends CRIU, and integrates with Docker. Experiments demonstrate that H-Container adds no overheads during program execution, while 10–100 ms are added during migration. Furthermore, we show the benefits of H-Container in real-world scenarios, demonstrating, for example, up to 94% increase in Redis throughput when client/server proximity is maintained through heterogeneous container migration.

边缘计算是最近的一种计算范式，它使云服务更接近客户端。除其他功能外，边缘计算还提供极低的客户端/服务器延迟。为了始终如一地提供如此低的延迟，服务应该在物理上尽可能靠近其客户端的边缘节点上运行。因此，当客户端的物理位置发生变化时，服务应该在边缘节点之间迁移以保持接近。与云节点不同，边缘节点集成了不同指令集架构 (ISA) 的 CPU，因此为给定 ISA 本地编译的程序无法迁移到配备不同 ISA 的 CPU 的服务器上。这阻碍了迁移到最近的节点。

我们介绍了 H-Container，该系统可以跨具有不同 ISA 的 CPU 的计算节点迁移本地编译的容器化应用程序。H-Container 在现有异构 ISA 迁移系统上的进步在于 (a) 高度兼容——不需要用户的源代码或编译器工具链修改；(b) 易于部署——完全在用户空间中实现，因此没有任何操作系统或虚拟机管理程序依赖，以及 (c) 很大程度上兼容 Linux——它可以迁移大多数 Linux 软件，包括服务器应用程序和动态链接的二进制文件。H-Container 以 Linux 及其已编译的可执行文件为目标，采用 LLVM，扩展 CRIU，并与 Docker 集成。实验表明，H-Container 在程序执行期间没有增加开销，而在迁移期间增加了 10-100 毫秒。此外，