On Supporting Service Selection for Collaborative Multi-cloud Ecosystems in Community Networks

Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs for communities to collaborate, leading to new services and collectively built infrastructures like community networks. 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. To address the limitation and enhance utility of community networks, we deploy collaborative clouds in community networks that allow interesting applications to be developed for serving local needs of communities. Such collaborative clouds employ resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services, and adapt to the specific social, economic and technical characteristics of the community networks. We need to support mechanisms that provide assistance in cloud service selection while taking into account different aspects pertaining to associated risks in community clouds, quality concerns of the users and cost limitations specifically in multi-clouds ecosystems. This paper proposes a risk-cost-quality based decision support system to assist the community cloud users to select the most appropriate cloud services meeting their needs. The proposed framework not only increases the ease of adoption of community clouds by providing assistance to users in cloud service selection, but also provides insights into the improvement of community clouds based on user behaviour.