Amin M. Khan

Clouds of small things: Provisioning infrastructure-as-a-service from within community networks

Community networks offer a shared communication infrastructure where communities of citizens build and own open networks. While the IP connectivity of the networking devices is successfully achieved, the number of services and applications available from within the community network is typically small and the usage of the community network is often limited to providing Internet access to remote areas through wireless links. In this paper we propose to apply the principle of resource sharing of community networks, currently limited to the network bandwidth, to other computing resources, which leads to cloud computing in community networks. Towards this vision, we review some characteristics of community networks and identify potential scenarios for community clouds. We simulate a cloud computing infrastructure service and discuss different aspects of its performance in comparison to a commercial centralized cloud system. We note that in community clouds the computing resources are heterogeneous and less powerful, which affects the time needed to assign resources. Response time of the infrastructure service is high in community clouds even for a small number of resources since resources are distributed, but tends to get closer to that of a centralized cloud when the number of resources requested increases. Our initial results suggest that the performance of the community clouds highly depends on the community network conditions, but has some potential for improvement with network-aware cloud services. The main strength compared to commercial cloud services, however, is that community cloud services hosted on community-owned resources will follow the principles of community network and will be neutral and open.

Cloud services in the Guifi.net community network

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 communitys 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 todays 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.

Supporting cloud deployment in the Guifi.net community network

Community networking is an emerging model of a shared communication infrastructure in which communities of citizens build and own open networks. Community networks offer successfully IP-based networking to the user. Cloud computing infrastructures however, while common in todays Internet, hardy exist in community networks. We explain our approach to bring clouds into the Guifi.net community network. For this we have started integrating part of our cloud prototype into the Guifi.net community network management tools. A proof-of-concept cloud infrastructure is currently under deployment in the Guifi.net community network. Our long term vision is that the users of community networks will not need to consume cloud applications from the Internet, but find them within the community network.

Towards Incentive-Based Resource Assignment and Regulation in Clouds for Community Networks

Community networks are built with off-the-shelf communication equipment aiming to satisfy a communitys demand for Internet access and services. These networks are a real world example of a collective that shares ICT resources. But while these community networks successfully achieve the IP connectivity over the shared network infrastructure, the deployment of applications inside of community networks is surprisingly low. Given that community networks are driven by volunteers, we believe that bringing in incentive-based mechanisms for service and application deployments in community networks will help in unlocking its true potential. We investigate in this paper such mechanisms to steer user contributions, in order to provide cloud services from within community networks. From the analysis of the community networks topology, we derive two scenarios of community clouds, the local cloud and the federated cloud. We develop an architecture tailored to community networks which integrates the incentive mechanism we propose. In simulations of large scale community cloud scenarios we study the behaviour of the incentive mechanism in different configurations, where slices of homogeneous virtual machine instances are shared. Our simulation results allow us to understand better how to configure such an incentive mechanism in a future prototype of a real community cloud system, which ultimately should lead to realisation of clouds in community networks.

Cloud-Based Extension for Community-Lab

Community-Lab is an open, distributed infrastructure for researchers to carry out experiments within wireless community networks. Community networks are an emergent model of infrastructures built with off-the-shelf communication equipment that aims to satisfy a communitys demand for Internet access and ICT services. Community-Lab consists of more than 100 nodes that are integrated in existing community networks, thus giving researchers access to community networks and allowing them to conduct experimental evaluation of routing protocols, services and applications deployed there. Community networks have now the opportunity to extend the collaborative network building to the next level, that is, building collaborative services implemented as community clouds, built, operated and maintained by the community, that run on community-owned heterogeneous resources, and offer cloud-based services that are of the communitys interest. This demo paper focuses on demonstrating the cloud extension of Community-Lab, enabling now community cloud experiments. By means of selected applications, we show how Community-Lab has been extended with distributed clouds, where different devices such as server, desktop PCs, low-resource embedded PCs and IoT boards are brought together forming a heterogeneous distributed cloud environment for researchers to experiment in community networks.

Incentive-based resource assignment and regulation for collaborative cloud services in community networks

Community networks are a successful example of a collective where communities operate ICT infrastructure based on the principle of reciprocal sharing of network bandwidth. Cloud computing, common in todays Internet, has however not materialised within community networks. We analyse in this paper socio-technical characteristics of community networks in order to derive scenarios for community clouds. Based on an architecture for such a community cloud, we implement a prototype for the incentive-driven resource assignment component and evaluate its behaviour experimentally. In simulations of large-scale community cloud scenarios we study the behaviour of the incentive mechanism in different configurations. Our evaluation gives insight into how the developed mechanisms regulate the consumption of cloud resources. Our results suggest a further integration of this regulation component into current cloud management platforms in order to open them up for the operation of an ecosystem of collaborative cloud services in community networks. We analyse socio-technical characteristics of community networks to realise clouds.We propose architecture tailored for local and federated community cloud scenarios.We present incentive-driven resource regulation mechanism to encourage contribution.We evaluate the mechanism with prototype implementation and simulation experiments.Incentives improve reciprocal sharing, efficiency and fairness in community cloud.

Support service for reciprocal computational resource sharing in wireless community networks

In community networks, individuals and local organizations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the communitys demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. Most current community networks use wireless links for the node interconnection, applying off-the-shelf wireless equipment. While IP connectivity over the shared network infrastructure is successfully achieved, the deployment of applications in community networks is surprisingly low. To address the solution of this problem, we propose in this paper a service to incentivize the contribution of computing and storage as cloud resources to community networks, in order to stimulate the deployment of services and applications. Our final goal is the vision that in the long term, the users of community networks will not need to consume applications from the Internet, but find them within the wireless community network.

Towards Distributed Architecture for Collaborative Cloud Services in Community Networks

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 communitys demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. The consolidation of todays 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.

Towards Incentive-Compatible Pricing for Bandwidth Reservation in Community Network Clouds

Community network clouds provide for applications of local interest deployed within community networks through collaborative efforts to provision cloud infrastructures. They complement the traditional large-scale public cloud providers similar to the model of decentralised edge clouds by bringing both content and computation closer to the users at the edges of the network. Services and applications within community network clouds require connectivity to the Internet and to the resources external to the community network, and here the current best-effort model of volunteers contributing gateway access in the community networks falls short. We model the problem of reserving the bandwidth at such gateways for guaranteeing quality-of-service for the cloud applications, and evaluate different pricing mechanisms for their suitability in ensuring maximal social welfare and eliciting truthful requests from the users. We find second-price auction based mechanisms, including Vickrey and generalised second price auctions, suitable for the bandwidth allocation problem at the gateways in the community networks.

Exploring the Role of Macroeconomic Mechanisms in Voluntary Resource Provisioning in Community Network Clouds

Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs of enabling individuals and communities to collaborate together. This collaboration has provided new services like user-generated content and social computing, as evident from success stories like Wikipedia. Through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures like community wireless mesh networks where users provide the communication network, have also emerged. Community networks have demonstrated successful bandwidth sharing, but have not been able to extend their collective effort to other computing resources like storage and processing. The success of cloud computing has been enabled by economies of scale and the need for elastic, flexible and on-demand provisioning of computing services. 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. We explore in this paper how macroeconomic mechanisms can play a role in overcoming the barriers of voluntary resource provisioning in such community clouds, by analysing the costs involved in building these services and how they give value to the participants. We indicate macroeconomic policies and how they can be implemented in community networks, to ease the uptake and ensure the sustainability of community clouds.