Support Service for Reciprocal Computational Resource Sharing in Wireless Community Networks

In community networks, individuals and local organizations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community's demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. Most current community networks use wireless links for the node interconnection, applying off-the-shelf wireless equipment. While IP connectivity over the shared network infrastructure is successfully achieved, the deployment of applications in community networks is surprisingly low. To address the solution of this problem, we propose in this paper a service to incentivize the contribution of computing and storage as cloud resources to community networks, in order to stimulate the deployment of services and applications. Our final goal is the vision that in the long term, the users of community networks will not need to consume applications from the Internet, but find them within the wireless community network

Towards distributed architecture for collaborative cloud services in community networks

Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs for communities to collaborate, leading to new services like user-generated content and social computing, and through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures like community networks have also emerged. Community networks get formed when individuals and local organisations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community’s demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. The consolidation of today’s cloud technologies offers now the possibility of collectively built community clouds, building upon user-generated content and user-provided networks towards an ecosystem of cloud services. To address the limitation and enhance utility of community networks, we propose a collaborative distributed architecture for building a community cloud system that employs resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services. Such architecture needs to be tailored to the specific social, economic and technical characteristics of the community networks for community clouds to be successful and sustainable. By real deployments of clouds in community networks and evaluation of application performance, we show that community clouds are feasible. Our result may encourage collaborative innovative cloud-based services made possible with the resources of a community.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Prototyping Incentive-based Resource Assignment for Clouds in Community Networks

Wireless community networks are a successful example of a collective where communities operate ICT infrastructure and provide IP connectivity based on the principle of reciprocal resource sharing of network bandwidth. This sharing, however, has not extended to computing and storage resources, resulting in very few applications and services which are currently deployed within community networks. Cloud computing, as in today's Internet, has made it common to consume resources provided by public clouds providers, but such cloud infrastructures have not materialized within community networks. We analyse in this paper socio-technical characteristics of community networks in order to derive scenarios for community clouds. Based on an architecture for such a community cloud, we implement a prototype for the incentive-driven resource assignment component, deploy it in a testbed of community network nodes, and evaluate its behaviour experimentally. Our evaluation gives insight into how the deployed prototype components regulate the consumption of cloud resources taking into account the users' contributions, and how this regulation affects the system usage. Our results suggest a further integration of this regulation component into current cloud management platforms in order to open them up for the operation of an ecosystem of community cloud

Towards incentive-compatible pricing for bandwidth reservation in community network clouds

Community network clouds provide for applications of local interest deployed within community networks through collaborative efforts to provision cloud infrastructures. They complement the traditional large-scale public cloud providers similar to the model of decentralised edge clouds by bringing both content and computation closer to the users at the edges of the network. Services and applications within community network clouds require connectivity to the Internet and to the resources external to the community network, and here the current besteffort model of volunteers contributing gateway access in the community networks falls short. We model the problem of reserving the bandwidth at such gateways for guaranteeing quality-of-service for the cloud applications, and evaluate different pricing mechanisms for their suitability in ensuring maximal social welfare and eliciting truthful requests from the users. We find second-price auction based mechanisms, including Vickrey and generalised second price auctions, suitable for the bandwidth allocation problem at the gateways in the community networks.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Community Networks and Sustainability: a Survey of Perceptions, Practices, and Proposed Solutions

Community network (CN) initiatives have been around for roughly two decades, evangelizing a distinctly different paradigm for building, maintaining, and sharing network infrastructure but also defending the basic human right to Internet access. Over this time they have evolved into a mosaic of systems that vary widely with respect to their network technologies, their offered services, their organizational structure, and the way they position themselves in the overall telecommunications’ ecosystem. Common to all these highly differentiated initiatives is the sustainability challenge. We approach sustainability as a broad term with an economical, political, and cultural context. We first review the different perceptions of the term. These vary both across and within the different types of stakeholders involved in CNs and are reflected in their motivation to join such initiatives. Then, we study the diverse approaches of CN operators towards the sustainability goal. Given the rich context of the term, these range all the way from mechanisms to fund their activities, to organizational structures and social activities serving as incentives for the engagement of their members. We iterate on incentive mechanisms that have been proposed and theoretically analyzed in the literature for CNs as well as tools and processes that have been actually implemented in them. Finally, we enumerate lessons that have been learned out of these two decades of CNs’ operation and discuss additional technological and regulatory issues that are key to their longer-term sustainability

Maximizing Energy-Efficiency in Multi-Relay OFDMA Cellular Networks

This contribution presents a method of obtaining the optimal power and subcarrier allocations that maximize the energy-efficiency (EE) of a multi-user, multi-relay, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular network. Initially, the objective function (OF) is formulated as the ratio of the spectral-efficiency (SE) over the power consumption of the network. This OF is shown to be quasi-concave, thus Dinkelbach's method can be employed for solving it as a series of parameterized concave problems. We characterize the performance of the aforementioned method by comparing the optimal solutions obtained to those found using an exhaustive search. Additionally, we explore the relationship between the achievable SE and EE in the cellular network upon increasing the number of active users. In general, increasing the number of users supported by the system benefits both the SE and EE, and higher SE values may be obtained at the cost of EE, when an increased power may be allocated.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, to appear in Proc. IEEE 2013 56th Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2013), Atlanta, USA, December, 201

COMPETITIVE DYNAMICS IN ELECTRONIC NETWORKS - ACHIEVING COMPETITIVENESS THROUGH INTERORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEMS

Many dramatic and potentially powerful uses of information technology involveinterorganizational systems (IOS). These systems, defined as distributed computing systems thatsupport shared processes between firms, have become fundamental to business operations,spanning multiple activities in value/supply chains. They have opened avenues to unprecedentedcollaborative linkages between firms. As IOS-mediated relational networks are rapidly evolving,roles of IOS have progressively changed beyond those of efficiency and power functions.To fully appreciate modern roles of IOS in e-business, this dissertation addresses two keyresearch questions: (1) How do firms achieve competitiveness through IOS? (2) How do IOSinfluence competitive behaviors of the competing firms in intertwined electronic networks? Itdoes so by integrating three research streams – social network analysis, interorganizationalsystems, and competitive dynamics – into a model of competitive dynamics in electronicnetworks. This study focuses on the paired relationships between the three constructs of networkstructure, IOS use, and competitive action, and empirically investigates nine general hypotheses.Data collection focuses on second-hand data in the automotive industry. A total of 805collaborative relationships, 106 IOS technologies and applications, and 305 competitive actionsinvolving nine major automakers are collected. Data sources include databases, major tradepublications, Web sites, and industry indices. Data analysis includes network analysis, ANOVAtest, and correlation.Empirical results support the general contention that network structure and IOS use coevolveand influence competitive action. Building on these results, a framework characterizingIOS\u27s roles in achieving firm competitiveness is concluded and advanced. This dissertation broadens our view of IOS\u27s roles in e-business. It contributes to IS/IOS theory, methodology, and practice. First, this study examines IOS-mediated networks inmultiple levels, including firm-level, pair-level, and network-level. It provides new theoreticalconceptualizations of IOS\u27s roles. Second, this study advances a new IT value measureaddressing limitations of the traditional measures. Third, it introduces a novel, usefulmethodology for data collection. Fourth, results from this study can guide a firm\u27s e-businessinitiatives for using IOS as powerful tools for achieving firm competitiveness