Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. While Internet access is the most popular service, the provision of services of local interest within the network is enabled by the emerging technology of CN micro-clouds. By putting services closer to users, micro-clouds pursue not only

Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs to collaborate for communities, leading to new services like user-generated content and social computing and, through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures, such as community networks. Community networks are formed when individuals and local organisations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community's demand for ICT. Internet access is often considered the main service of community networks, but the provision of services of local interest within the network is a unique opportunity for community networks, which is currently predominantly unexplored. The consolidation of today's cloud technologies offers community networks the possibility to collectively build community clouds, building upon user-provided networks, and extending towards an ecosystem of cloud services. We propose a framework for building a collaborative distributed community cloud system that employs resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services. This framework is tailored to the specific social, economic, and technical characteristics of community networks and requirements for community clouds in order to be successful and sustainable. We materialise this framework in the implementation of the Cloudy distribution. We conduct real deployments of these clouds in the Guifi.net community network and evaluate cloud-based applications such as service discovery and distributed storage. This deployment experience supports the feasibility of community clouds and our measurements demonstrate the performance of services and applications running in these community clouds. Our results encourage the development and operation of collaborative cloud-based services using the resources of a community network. We anticipate that such services can effectively complement commercial offers and have the potential to boost innovation in application areas in which end-user involvement is required.

Abstract-Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. To reduce the complexity of service deployment, community micro-clouds have recently emerged as a promising enabler for the delivery of cloud services to community users. By putting services closer to consumers, micro-clouds pursue not only a better service performance, but also a low entry barrier for the deployment of mainstream Internet services within the CN. Unfortunately, the provisioning of the services is not so simple. Due to the large and irregular topology, high software and hardware diversity of CNs, it requires of a "careful" placement of micro-clouds and services over the network.To achieve this, this paper proposes to leverage state information about the network to inform service placement decisions, and to do so through a fast heuristic algorithm, which is vital to quickly react to changing conditions. To evaluate its performance, we compare our heuristic with one based on random placement in Guifi.net, the biggest CN worldwide. Our experimental results show that our heuristic consistently outperforms random placement by 211% in terms of bandwidth gain. We quantify the benefits of our heuristic on a real live video-streaming service, and demonstrate that video chunk losses decrease significantly, attaining a 37% decrease in the loss packet rate. Further, using a popular Web 2.0 service, we demonstrate that the client response times decrease up to an order of magnitude when using our heuristic.

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Recently, mesh networking and blockchain are two of the hottest technologies in the telecommunications industry. Combining both can reformulate internet access and make connecting to the Internet not only easy, but affordable too. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. We evaluate HLF in a real production mesh network and in the laboratory, quantify its performance, bottlenecks and limitations of the current implementation. We identify the opportunities for improvement to serve the needs of wireless mesh access networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first HLF deployment made in a production wireless mesh network.2 https://fundacio.guifi.net/Foundation

Community networks are decentralized communication networks built and operated by citizens, for citizens. Most users see in community networks only the possibility to gain Internet access, while we propose clouds in community networks as the real opportunity: different to the general purpose cloudbased applications offered in the Internet, community clouds would allow providing cloud-based services that are relevant for the community and that are shaped and owned by the community. It is in favour of our vision that today's cloud management systems and applications have consolidated and can run on commodity hardware, making them now ready for potential deployment and usage in community networks. The experience that we report in this paper is on a real distributed cloud that we have permanently running within a community network, where for our experiments two distributed file systems were deployed over very heterogeneous distributed cloud resources that are part of the system. Tahoe-LAFS and XtreemFS were evaluated where the distributed storage nodes are provided by KVM-based VMs from Proxmox and OpenStack cloud management platforms, by Linux containers (LXC) from a community resource management platform and even from storage space on IoT embedded boards. Furthermore, we implement a service discovery and publishing mechanism that automatically publishes and discovers available services (e.g. distributed storage service) of a cloud node to all the other nodes. We compared the performance of Tahoe-LAFS and XtreemFS in this highly diverse settings and under the dynamic conditions of the community network. While both file system performed functionally correct, since Tahoe-LAFS offers end-toend encryption by default and fault-tolerance to churn of nodes, it seems to be able to be a solution for important use cases for storage in community networks where privacy of data is important.

Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low-cost Internet access with infrastructures built from routers contributed by diverse owners, whereas blockchain enables transparency and accountability for investments, revenue, or other forms of economic compensations from sharing of network traffic, content, and services. Crowdsourcing network coverage, combined with crowdfunding costs, can create economically sustainable yet decentralized Internet access. This means that every participant can invest in resources and pay or be paid for usage to recover the costs of network devices and maintenance. While mesh networks and mesh routing protocols enable self-organized networks that expand organically, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts enable the economic coordination among network providers and consumers. We explore and evaluate two existing blockchain software stacks, Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and Ethereum geth with Proof of Authority (PoA) intended as a local lightweight distributed ledger, deployed in a real city-wide production mesh network and in laboratory network. We quantify the performance and bottlenecks and identify the current limitations and opportunities for improvement to serve locally the needs of wireless mesh networks, without the privacy and economic cost of relying on public blockchains. KEYWORDS blockchain, Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, mesh networks, performance evaluation INTRODUCTIONNetwork infrastructures are critical to provide local and global connectivity that enables access to information, social inclusion, and participation for everyone. Local connectivity largely relies on access networks. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are a kind of access networks comprising of wireless nodes, namely wireless mesh routers, wireless mesh clients, and network gateways. A client (connected through WiFi or wired to a mesh router) can access the Internet across a WMN. 1 These are self-organized networks that can grow organically: new network links can expand the coverage of the network or increase the capacity when links get overused. The routing protocol runs in every router by measuring the performance and quality of links and coordinates distributed decisions about the best network paths periodically. As a result, once a routing protocol is adopted, the development and operation of the network only depends on pooling routers and links with local decisions, without any central planning or management.These decentralized networks are essential to develop community access networks, network infrastructure commons, built by citizens and organizations which pool their resources and coordinate their efforts, characterized by being open, free, and neutral. 2 These decentralized access networks have been identified as one way to connect the next billion people that are still without the Internet access. 3 Guifi.net* is an example of such a community effort, which is one of the biggest commun...