A survey of cloud services and potential applications of social awareness

The variety of emerging cloud services and applications manifests in a multitude of network and hardware requirements, but also in different service and traffic characteristics. Due to the popularity of clouds, a set of issues emerges for the different stakeholders involved in providing and delivering cloud services to the end user. Not only pure network layer optimization, but especially the new field of socially-aware traffic management seems promising to overcome these issues. In this paper, the applicability of social awareness to different types of cloud services is discussed. For that purpose, cloud applications are classified according to relevant technical and non-technical characteristics. Based on this novel classification scheme, the benefits and challenges of social awareness are discussed and examples for the optimization of cloud services are given

Socially-aware management of new overlay applications traffic - The optimization potentials of the SmartenIT approach

Today's overlay-based mobile cloud applications determine a challenge to operators and cloud providers in terms of increasing traffic demands and energy costs. The social-aware management of overlay traffic is a promising optimization approach, which shows potential for improvements by exploiting social information. This paper identifies key stakeholders and their roles in the service provisioning value chain and outlines major markets and optimization potentials. Accordingly, two scenarios are developed: the end user focused scenario aiming at increased QoE for end users, and the operator focused scenario targeting at the highest operating efficiency in terms of low cost and high revenue for the operator. The energy efficiency plays a major role as a key performance metric in both scenarios. SmartenIT's socially-aware management approach is illustrated based on two example mechanisms for traffic optimization: the home router sharing mechanism (HORST) on the end user side, as well as the dynamic traffic management mechanism (DTM) on the operator side. The paper is concluded by a first sketch of SmartenIT's architecture and its mapping to the two scenario