Integration of an Assisted P2P Live Streaming Service in Community Network Clouds

Abstract

Wireless community networks (CNs) are large-scale, self-organized and decentralized communication infrastructures built and operated by citizens for citizens. CN cloud infrastructures have been recently introduced to run services inside the network, without the need to consume them from the Internet. We have developed a Linux-based distribution code-named Cloudy, which fosters the service deployment and automation in CN clouds. In this paper, we present two ways provisioned by Cloudy to integrate the services and improve the user QoS in these clouds. First, we present a distributed service discovery mechanism that helps users with service quality metrics to choose the best service from a pool of instances. Second, we experiment with a live video streaming service deployed in CN environments, using more than 50 real CN nodes distributed across Europe for the evaluation. Our analysis shows that, tuning the vital parameters of this service as neighborhood peer selection strategy and source node dispersion strategy, improves the video streaming QoS in the CNs. Our results indicate that both ways help the user to experience improved service performance. Automated service selection, needed once the number of micro service providers becomes larger, is the next step that can be built upon our results.