Christian L. Belady

Prometheus: a wirelessly interconnected, pico-datacenter framework for the developing world

The promise of cloud computing is, nowadays, mostly limited to the developed regions of the world where, approximately, only one half of the worlds population lives. In this paper, we present an attempt to bring the cloud to the majority populations of the developing world, with the help of long-distance, wirelessly connected and renewable-energy-powered pico-datacenters, the Prometheus nodes. Along with the physical layer and ad-hoc network routing characteristics of the prototype nodes, the challenges and potential solutions in designing such a network with constraints on renewable energy availability, bandwidth and connectivity to the Internet are discussed. With this multifaceted theoretical and experimental analysis, we believe that not only does the pico-DC framework constitute a highly viable solution for the developing world to share computational resources and storage services over wireless links but also that Prometheus can significantly help to improve multiple socioeconomic aspects of the populations of the developing world.