Exploring local service allocation in Community Networks

Community Cloud computing is a new trend on cloud computing that aims to build service infrastructures upon Wireless Community Networks taking advantage of underused community physical resources. Service allocation protocols are a key design challenge that all cloud systems must properly address to optimize resource utilization. They are specially important when cloud services require a Quality of Service (QoS) and network stability or performance (delay, jitter, minimum bandwidth) cannot be guaranteed a-priory. This work presents a study that tries to understand how to address cloud service deployments in such scenario. In particular, we start proposing an allocation algorithm to find optimal solutions when there is a central authority that coordinates the process. These solutions optimize the communication cost in two ways: (1) minimizing the service overlay diameter and, (2) minimizing the coordination cost along the network. Based on the study of the algorithm and the experimental simulations, we study the variables that outcome optimal service allocations to the detriment of other solutions. We verify these findings using data mining techniques. Researchers can take advantage of the simulation results and our observations to design more reliable distributed algorithms able to dynamically self-adapt to network changes.