XDN Service
An XDN service aims to host stateful interactive applications for end users on the best-suited servers. An XDN service consists of three major stakeholders/entities, i.e., XDN providers, customers, and clients.
To make it easier for readers to understand the concepts, we use the terminologies similar to those used in a CDN service, in which a CDN customer purchases a CDN service from a CDN provider to host his contents in order to serve the requests from CDN clients/end users. It is possible for a CDN customer to purchase the CDN service from multiple CDN providers, which is also possible for XDN. However, for the sake of clarity, we only consider a single service provider to provide XDN service to its customers.
XDN providers are the entities that provides XDN service to its customers and serves XDN end clients with applications deployed by its customers on XDN cluster.
XDN customers are the entities that purchase computing and storage resources from the XDN provider to host their applications on the XDN cluster. The XDN customers are usually considered as XDN application developers.
XDN clients are the users of XDN customers' applications and the targets of an XDN service to serve.