Abstract:
Community networks are decentralized communication networks built and operated by citizens, for citizens. Most users see in community networks only the possibility to gai...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
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 cloud-based 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 Xtreem FS were evaluated where the distributed storage nodes are provided by KVM-based VMs from Proxmox and Open Stack 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 Xtreem FS 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-to-end 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.
Date of Conference: 08-11 December 2014
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 02 February 2015
Electronic ISBN:978-1-4799-7881-6