Cloud-Based Extension for Community-Lab

2014 IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing

Centelles

et al. 2014

Self Cite

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.

Section: E X P E R I M E N T S a Experimental Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed Storage and Service Discovery for Heterogeneous Community Network Clouds

Selimi

2014 IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing

Centelles

et al. 2014

Self Cite

“…We explain in this section our current work in setting up a prototype cloud infrastructure in Guifi.net and Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) 13 community networks, and present results from our experiments with distributed storage and data sharing service running in this testbed.…”

Section: B Socio-economic Mechanisms For Supporting Collaborationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In our earlier work, we have explored how incentive-based resource regulation [4]- [6] and economic policies [7] can affect collaboration among the members of community networks, and how the scalability issues can affect the design of a community cloud system [8]. We are also building a prototype system to be deployed in Guifi.net community network [9], [10], and investigating the performance of cloud services in these realworld settings [11]- [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Distributed Architecture for Collaborative Cloud Services in Community Networks

Khan

Selimi

2014 International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems

2014

Self Cite

Abstract-Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs for communities to collaborate, leading to new services like user-generated content and social computing, and through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures like community networks have also emerged. Community networks get 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, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. The consolidation of today's cloud technologies offers now the possibility of collectively built community clouds, building upon user-generated content and user-provided networks towards an ecosystem of cloud services. To address the limitation and enhance utility of community networks, we propose a collaborative distributed architecture for building a community cloud system that employs resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services. Such architecture needs to be tailored to the specific social, economic and technical characteristics of the community networks for community clouds to be successful and sustainable. By real deployments of clouds in community networks and evaluation of application performance, we show that community clouds are feasible. Our result may encourage collaborative innovative cloud-based services made possible with the resources of a community.Index Terms-cloud computing; community cloud; community networks; collaborative resource sharing I . I N T R O D U C T I O NThe recent developments in information and communication technologies have significantly reduced the barriers for communication, coordination and collaboration for individuals and communities. This not only gave rise to widely adopted applications like social networking and user-generated content among many others, but infrastructures based on a cooperative model have also been built, for example community wireless mesh networks [1], which gained momentum in early 2000s in response to limited options for network connectivity in rural and urban communities. Using off-the-shelf network equipment and open unlicensed wireless spectrum, volunteers teamed up to invest, create and run wireless networks in their local communities as an open telecommunication infrastructure based on self-service and self-management by the users. These community networks have proved quite successful, for example Guifi.net 1 provides wireless and optical fibre based broadband 1 http://guifi.net access to more than 20,000 users. Current community networks use mainly wireless technology to interconnect nodes. With the commoditization of optical fibre, some community networks however have also started providing broadband services combining both technologies. Community networks are a successful case of resource sharing among a collective, where resources shared are not only the networking hardware but also the time, effort and knowledge contributed...

“…In this section, we explain the system overview of the CONFINE CommunityLab infrastructure. The CONFINE project goal is to augment the capabilities of community networks by providing a platform for the existing community network in which users can use services with ease [6], as if they were deploying in any commodity cloud platform. Members of the CONFINE community network testbed are privileged to get a set of IP addresses (IPv4) in order for them to be able to run multiple services, as they may require.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging deployment models on low-resource devices for cloud services in community networks

Apolónia

Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory

Navarro

2017

Self Cite

Abstract-Community networks are IP networks constantly being improved that evolve into large-scale computing platforms. This has resulted from the effort to adapt the cloud computing model towards services that can operate and utilize the resources inside the community network. The network and its infrastructure are contributed by individuals, companies, organizations and are maintained by the community itself. Community cloud devices are often low computing resource devices, such as home gateways, with limited capabilities. Currently, these devices are configured to run community services only. This has become a drawback for further adoption because of contributor's difficulty to also use the donated cloud device for private purposes. We apply container-based virtualization for the problem of resource sharing in low-capacity devices in order to create a multi-purpose execution environment in a single device. Thus, a single device can be configured to deliver to the user and the community a multi-purpose environment, such as personal and public, isolated from one another, while preserving the community cloud services. Our comparative analysis with the current infrastructure in community networks gives evidence that the capability of the devices to run concurrent services is maintained.