Abstract
Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. While Internet access is the most popular service, the provision of services of local interest within the network is enabled by the emerging technology of CN micro-clouds. By putting services closer to users, micro-clouds pursue not only a better service performance, but also a low entry barrier for the deployment of mainstream Internet services within the CN. Unfortunately, the provisioning of these services is not so simple. Due to the large and irregular topology, high software and hardware diversity of CNs, a “careful” placement of micro-clouds services over the network is required to optimize service performance. This paper proposes to leverage state information about the network to inform service placement decisions, and to do so through a fast heuristic algorithm, which is critical to quickly react to changing conditions. To evaluate its performance, we compare our heuristic with one based on random placement in Guifi.net, the biggest CN worldwide. Our experimental results show that our heuristic consistently outperforms random placement by 2x in bandwidth gain. We quantify the benefits of our heuristic on a real live video-streaming service, and demonstrate that video chunk losses decrease significantly, attaining a 37% decrease in the packet loss rate. Further, using a popular Web 2.0 service, we demonstrate that the client response times decrease up to an order of magnitude when using our heuristic. Since these improvements translate in the QoE (Quality of Experience) perceived by the user, our results are relevant for contributing to higher QoE, a crucial parameter for using services from volunteer-based systems and adapting CN micro-clouds as an eco-system for service deployment.
Highlights
Since early 2000s, community networks (CNs) or “Do-It-Yourself ” networks have gained momentum in response to the growing demands for network connectivity in rural and urban communities
Based on the network measurements we did at the Quick Mesh Project (QMP) network, first we describe our model for network and service graph
For k = 1, the BASP decreases the average chunk loss from 12 to 10%. This case corresponds to the scenario where there is one single source node streaming to the 20 peers in the QMP network
Summary
Since early 2000s, community networks (CNs) or “Do-It-Yourself ” networks have gained momentum in response to the growing demands for network connectivity in rural and urban communities. The main singularity of CNs is that they are built “bottom-up”, mixing wireless and wired links, with communities of citizens building, operating and managing the network. Devices are typically “low-tech”, built entirely by off-the-shelf hardware and open source software, which communicate over wireless links This poses several challenges, such as the lack of service guarantees, inefficient use of the available resources, and absence of security, to name just a few. In CN micro-clouds, by contrast to other edge computing models, the users of edge services are enabled to collaborate and actively participate in the service provision, and contribute to sustain edge micro-clouds They are deployed over a single or set of user nodes, and comparing to the public clouds they have a smaller scale, so one still gets high performance due to locality and control over service placement
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