On participatory service provision at the network edge with community home gateways

Edge computing is considered as a technology to enable new types of services which operate at the network edge. There are important use cases in ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) for edge computing driven by huge business potentials. Most of today's edge computing platforms, however, consist of proprietary gateways, which are either closed or fairly restricted to deploy any third-party services. In this paper we discuss a participatory edge computing system running on home gateways to serve as an open environment to deploy local services. We present first motivating use cases and review existing approaches and design considerations for the proposed system. Then we show our platform which materializes the principles of an open and participatory edge environment, to lower the entry barriers for service deployment at the network edge. By using containers, our platform can flexibly enable third-party services, and may serve as an infrastructure to support several application domains of ambient intelligence.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Gossip-based service monitoring platform for wireless edge cloud computing

Edge cloud computing proposes to support shared services, by using the infrastructure at the network's edge. An important problem is the monitoring and management of services across the edge environment. Therefore, dissemination and gathering of data is not straightforward, differing from the classic cloud infrastructure. In this paper, we consider the environment of community networks for edge cloud computing, in which the monitoring of cloud services is required. We propose a monitoring platform to collect near real-time data about the services offered in the community network using a gossip-enabled network. We analyze and apply this gossip-enabled network to perform service discovery and information sharing, enabling data dissemination among the community. We implemented our solution as a prototype and used it for collecting service monitoring data from the real operational community network cloud, as a feasible deployment of our solution. By means of emulation and simulation we analyze in different scenarios, the behavior of the gossip overlay solution, and obtain average results regarding information propagation and consistency needs, i.e. in high latency situations, data convergence occurs within minutes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On the collaborative governance of decentralized edge microclouds with blockchain-based distributed ledgers

Today's commercial model for edge computing services consists in lightweight devices at the network edge connected through the Internet to remote cloud data centers. Microclouds are an alternative vision of edge computing, where the cloud infrastructure runs at the network edge leveraging decentralized resource contributions of a community. But current attempts to build such microclouds lack a collaborative governance system to operate successfully. In this paper we discuss the opportunity to implement with blockchain technologies key services to enable the decentralized collaborative governance of microclouds. A multiagent approach could further contribute to improve the efficiency in the decision making in the collaborative governance service.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Practical service placement approach for microservices architecture

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. To reduce the complexity of service deployment, community micro-clouds have recently emerged as a promising enabler for the delivery of cloud services to community users. By putting services closer to consumers, 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 the services is not so simple. Due to the large and irregular topology, high software and hardware diversity of CNs, it requires of aPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Toward Smart Community Networks

The advent of IEEE 802.11 in the late 1990s spurred the development of new network paradigms. In particular, new technology enthusiasts saw the potential of WiFi to bring broadband Internet connections to under-provisioned areas, giving rise to networks deployed and maintained by their users. This paradigm led to non-profit decentralized structures that grow by the unplanned addition of heterogeneous network devices: community networks (CNs). There have been hundreds of CN deployments worldwide; some have disappeared, while others have blossomed into complex networks with thousands of nodes. The networking research community has been aware of CNs, and many works studied CNs in their various aspects: design (routing, scalability, security), deployment, measurements, services, and so on. We argue that emerging technologies will give a new impetus to CNs by transforming them into smart CNs. This article aims to lay out the technical features of future CNs and encourage the research community to tackle the stimulating research challenges they raise

Advances in wireless community networks with the community-lab testbed

Beyond traditional telecom providers, citizens and organizations pool their own resources and coordinate in order to build local network infrastructures to address the digital divide in many parts of the world. These crowdsourced network infrastructures can be self-organized and shared by a community for the collective benefit of its members. Several of these networks have developed open, free, and neutral agreements, and are governed as a common-pool resource: community networks. These are built using a variety of commodity wireless hardware (e.g., Wi-Fi long-range point-to-point links, Wi-Fi and GSM access points, and mesh networks), sometimes optical fiber links, heterogeneous nodes, routing protocols, and applications. A group of researchers, developers, and community networks developed the Community-Lab testbed, and for the last five years have worked together to overcome obstacles, improve the technologies, tools, and operational models being used, as well as model best practices for more effective and sustainable community networks. This article presents the challenges for experimentation, the testbeds built, results, lessons learned, and the impact of that work to place wireless community networks as one sustainable way toward an Internet accessible to all.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On edge cloud service provision with distributed home servers

Edge computing has been proposed for new types of cloud services, which need computing infrastructure at the network edge. Driven by important use cases from the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, edge cloud computing has also a huge business potential. Edge computing devices are already operational in many industrial and consumer-oriented scenarios. A typical characteristic of these solutions is, however, that the hardware and software platforms in use are proprietary and closed. The interaction among the different vendor platforms, and their extension with third party services, in general, is not well supported. As a consequence, the opportunities for third party providers to build new tailored edge services on these platforms face significant barriers. In this paper we argue to build a collaborative edge cloud deployed on home servers. We position the proposed system and describe its building elements, where we use Docker containers for provisioning the services.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Cloudy in guifi.net: Establishing and sustaining a community cloud as open commons

Commons are natural or human-made resources that are managed cooperatively. The guifi.net community network is a successful example of a digital infrastructure, a computer network, managed as an open commons. Inspired by the guifi.net case and its commons governance model, we claim that a computing cloud, another digital infrastructure, can also be managed as an open commons if the appropriate tools are put in place. In this paper, we explore the feasibility and sustainability of community clouds as open commons: open user-driven clouds formed by community-managed computing resources. We propose organising the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud service layers as common-pool resources (CPR) for enabling a sustainable cloud service provision. On this basis, we have outlined a governance framework for community clouds, and we have developed Cloudy, a cloud software stack that comprises a set of tools and components to build and operate community cloud services. Cloudy is tailored to the needs of the guifi.net community network, but it can be adopted by other communities. We have validated the feasibility of community clouds in a deployment in guifi.net of some 60 devices running Cloudy for over two years. To gain insight into the capacity of end-user services to generate enough value and utility to sustain the whole cloud ecosystem, we have developed a file storage application and tested it with a group of 10 guifi.net users. The experimental results and the experience from the action research confirm the feasibility and potential sustainability of the community cloud as an open commons.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On edge microclouds to provide local container-based services

Edge computing has been proposed to enable more user-centric cloud-based services. Nowadays, edge computing is operational in industrial and consumer-oriented scenarios. An important limitation of today's solutions, however, is that the used hardware and software platforms are proprietary and closed, and cannot easily be leveraged to perform other services beyond the specific business case. For instance, the interaction among different edge platforms or service extension by third parties is in general not supported. As a consequence, the opportunity for local stakeholders to provide innovative tailored edge service with these platforms face important barriers. In this paper we present edge microclouds deployed on local servers and an implementation using containers for service provision. We show how the adopted container approach facilitates the users to create and share services at the network edge. With the presented approach, third parties can deploy more tailored and customized services at the network edge, enabling to better fulfill specific local needs and constraints. It is also an opportunity for building cloud-based service provision with a pool of local resource-constraint edge devices.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft