Assessing the participatory design of a project-based course on computer network applications

New teaching methodologies which foster student involvement, such as project-based learning, are nowadays part of the study curriculum of many engineering schools. Project-based learning courses, however, often build upon other previously taught technical courses, where the technical content for the project to be developed is studied. That type of course design focuses on building the transversal capabilities of students, and the technical challenges of the project are the mean to acquire these non-technical skills. In this paper, we present and assess a project-based course on computer network applications of a computer science school, which has been designed to improve within the same course both the transversal and technical skills of the students. The proposition of interest is that the course not only aims to train the students’ transversal skills by a group work project, but also to practise new technical topics and technologies. We argue that the key element of the proposed course design is that each student project group defines with the instructor the project they would like to develop in the course. We present first the design of the course and then an assessment with questionnaires, which were conducted over two semesters with the students enrolled in the course. The obtained results indicate that the students achieved both technical and transversal skills, while the instructors need to be flexible to adapt to diverse technical topics of the proposed projects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Building microclouds at the network edge with the Cloudy platform

Edge computing enables new types of services which operate at the network edge. There are important use cases in pervasive computing, ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) for edge computing. In this demo paper we present microclouds deployed at the networks edge in the Guifi.net community network leveraging an open extensible platform called Cloudy. The demonstration focuses on the following aspects: The usage of Cloudy for end users, the services of Cloudy to build microclouds, and the application scenarios of IoT data management within microclouds.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Clouds of Small Things: Provisioning Infrastructure-as-a-Service from within Community Networks

Community networks offer a shared communication infrastructure where communities of citizens build and own open networks. While the IP connectivity of the networking devices is successfully achieved, the number of services and applications available from within the community network is typically small and the usage of the community network is often limited to providing Internet access to remote areas through wireless links. In this paper we propose to apply the principle of resource sharing of community networks, currently limited to the network bandwidth, to other computing resources, which leads to cloud computing in community networks. Towards this vision, we review some characteristics of community networks and identify potential scenarios for community clouds. We simulate a cloud computing infrastructure service and discuss different aspects of its performance in comparison to a commercial centralized cloud system. We note that in community clouds the computing resources are heterogeneous and less powerful, which affects the time needed to assign resources. Response time of the infrastructure service is high in community clouds even for a small number of resources since resources are distributed, but tends to get closer to that of a centralized cloud when the number of resources requested increases. Our initial results suggest that the performance of the community clouds highly depends on the community network conditions, but has some potential for improvement with network-aware cloud services. The main strength compared to commercial cloud services, however, is that community cloud services hosted on community-owned resources will follow the principles of community network and will be neutral and open

Topology patterns of a community network: Guifi.net

This paper presents a measurement study of the topology and its effect on usage of Guifi.net, a large-scale community network. It focuses on the main issues faced by community network and lessons to consider for its future growth in order to preserve its scalability, stability and openness. The results show the network topology as an atypical high density Scale-Free network with critical points of failure and poor gateway selection or placement. In addition we have found paths with a large number of hops i.e. large diameter of the graph, and specifically long paths between leaf nodes and web proxies. The usage analysis using a widespread web proxy service confirms that these topological properties have an impact on the user experience

Spain

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) constitute a market where diverse industries, producers and consumers converge, but also a public space where citizens and organisations live and interact. Although the ICT market is huge and involves a large part of the population, the ICT public space as a social structure where citizens and organisations exercise the right to communicate is fragile and underdeveloped. In this context, this report focuses on appropriateness of technology and locally relevant content, applications and services.Postprint (published version

Object Distribution Networks for World-wide Document Circulation

This paper presents an Object Distribution System (ODS), a distributed system inspired by the ultra-large scale distribution models used in everyday life (e.g. food or newspapers distribution chains). Beyond traditional mechanisms of approaching information to readers (e.g. caching and mirroring), this system enables the publication, classification and subscription to volumes of objects (e.g. documents, events). Authors submit their contents to publication agents. Classification authorities provide classification schemes to classify objects. Readers subscribe to topics or authors, and retrieve contents from their local delivery agent (like a kiosk or library, with local copies of objects). Object distribution is an independent process where objects circulate asynchronously among distribution agents. ODS is designed to perform specially well in an increasingly populated, widespread and complex Internet jungle, using weak consistency replication by object distribution, asynchronous replication, and local access to objects by clients. ODS is based on two independent virtual networks, one dedicated to the distribution (replication) of objects and the other to calculate optimised distribution chains to be applied by the first network

LaCOLLA: A Middleware to Support Self-sufficient Collaborative Groups

In a decentralised and distributed environment, collaboration requiring the sharing and building of applications is a complex task. For this reason, we propose LaCOLLA, a fully decentralised peer-to-peer middleware that aims to simplify the process of incorporating collaborative functionalities into any application. It provides applications with certain essential collaborative functionalities: dissemination of information, storage, presence and transparency of location, management of members and groups, and execution of tasks. A distinguishing feature of LaCOLLA is that participants provide resources for the benefit of the group. This enables collaboration activities to take place in a collective environment using only the resources provided by participants in the collaboration (self-sufficiency). In this paper we present and evaluate the architecture of LaCOLLA, its API, and key aspects of its implementation

Spain

How can we make citizens’ rights effective in the information society? Without a doubt, the answer is: with a wider and more direct participation by citizens. However, the development of the information society is dominated by a commercial and technical perspective that tends to be emphasised to the detriment of other perspectives that are much more important but more difficult to measure. These include: the definition of the rules of the game and the “social contract” (e.g. legal framework), as well as indicators of indirect impact such as production of and access to knowledge, changes in social relations and participation.Postprint (published version