Community networking is an emerging model of a shared communication infrastructure in which communities of citizens build and own open networks. Community networks offer successfully IP-based networking to the user. In addition, some hosts are connected to the network nodes in order to provide network management and end user services. Recently, clouds have been proposed for community networks. Some research projects such as Clommunity have started deploying computational infrastructure to enable cloud computing within community networks. In this paper we propose different options for such community clouds to contribute to energy efficient systems, in particular regarding cloud-based services and in relation to Smart Grid. Further discussion and interaction with the research initiatives on energy efficient systems should identify the most promising approach and outline possible ways for implementation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Baig Viñas, Roger

Escrich, Pau

Freitag, Fèlix

Khan, Muhammad Amin

Navarro Moldes, Leandro

Sharifi, Leila

Veiga, Luis

Information Technology and Nanotechnology

English

UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC

Copyright c© papers’ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.A Look at Energy Efficient System Opportunitieswith Community Network CloudsFelix Freitag∗, Leila Sharifi∗‡, Amin M. Khan∗‡, Leandro Navarro∗, Roger Baig†, Pau Escrich†, Luı´s Veiga‡∗ Department of Computer Architecture. Universitat Polite`cnica de Catalunya. Barcelona, Spain{felix, lsharifi, mkhan, leandro}@ac.upc.edu† Fundacio´ Privada per la Xarxa Lliure, Oberta i Neural Guifi.net. Mas l’Esperana, 08503 Gurb, Catalonia{roger.baig, pau.escrich}@guifi.net‡ Instituto Superior Te´cnico. Universidade de Lisboa. INESC-ID Lisboa. Lisbon, Portugal{luis.veiga}@inesc-id.ptAbstract—Community networking is an emerging model ofa shared communication infrastructure in which communitiesof citizens build and own open networks. Community networksoffer successfully IP-based networking to the user. In addition,some hosts are connected to the network nodes in order toprovide network management and end user services. Recently,clouds have been proposed for community networks. Someresearch projects such as Clommunity have started deployingcomputational infrastructure to enable cloud computing withincommunity networks. In this paper we propose different optionsfor such community clouds to contribute to energy efficientsystems, in particular regarding cloud-based services and inrelation to Smart Grid. Further discussion and interaction withthe research initiatives on energy efficient systems should identifythe most promising approach and outline possible ways forimplementation.Index Terms—community networks; cloud computingI . I N T R O D U C T I O NCommunity networks are user-driven communication net-works which often originated from the lack of Internet con-nectivity in rural areas. There are several community-ownednetworks in the range of 500 to 20,000 nodes in Europe suchas FunkFeuer, AWMN, Guifi.net, Freifunk and many moreworldwide. Most of them are based on Wi-Fi technology (ad-hoc networks or IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n access points in the firsthop, long-distance point-to-point Wi-Fi links for the trunknetwork), but also a growing number of optic fibre links havestarted to become deployed [1]. Guifi.net in Spain (Figure 1)is probably the largest community network worldwide and it iswhere the cloud deployment takes place which we are currentlyundertaking.The community cloud we consider here are cloud deploy-ment in community networks: A cloud hosted on community-owned computing and communication resources providingservices of local interest. The concept of community cloudshas been introduced in its generic form before, e.g., [2], [3],as a cloud deployment model in which a cloud infrastructureis built and provisioned for an exclusive use by a specificcommunity of consumers with shared concerns and interests,owned and managed by the community or by a third party ora combination of both.Such community cloud built in community networks haveFig. 1. Guifi.net nodes and links in the area around Barcelonafeatures which may contribute to energy efficient cloud systemdesign and implementation.• Distributed and heterogeneous hardware: Cloud hardwarein community clouds is contributed by the users, hardwarecan be heterogeneous and it is at the users’ premises.• Decentralized service management: The network andcloud services are managed by the users. Services maybe shared among users to build collaborative applications.• Community-driven services: The potential of the com-munity cloud is to deploy services of local interest.Awareness of energy-efficiency may be brought to theusers, which could drive a fast roll-out of services tosupport energy-efficiency.We describe in the following section first the characteristicsof the cloud deployment that we have started in the Guifi.netcommunity network. Secondly, we sketch some proposals tobenefit from community network cloud infrastructure to buildenergy efficient systems.I I . C L O U D S I N C O M M U N I T Y N E T W O R K SIn this section we explain some components of the cloud wehave deployed in Guifi.net community network, which presentsa real case for our proposals for extending towards energy-efficiency in section III.Fig. 2. Conceptual schema of microclouds in a community wireless networkA. TopologyCloud in community networks needs to fit into the condi-tions of how these networks are built, governed and grown.Regarding their growth, one important aspect is the topologyof community networks, which determines the scope of theoptions how the cloud infrastructure can be integrated. InFigure 2 some node types of a community wireless network aredepicted. The picture shows some typical community nodeswith a router and some server or clients attached to it. Someclients nodes are shown that are connected to the access point(AP) of a super node. In addition, however, these communitynodes have cloud resources attached to them which are part ofthe community cloud. In addition, depending on the topology ofthe wireless network and the social structure of the community,several local community clouds may appear which managelocally the cloud resources belonging to a certain zone definedgeographically or by its social networks. We call such localclouds microclouds. A set of microclouds are interconnectedthough the wireless links of the super node backbone network.B. HardwareIn Figure 3 an example of the indoor hardware of a cloudnode is shown. In this case a small Jetway device is usedas cloud resource. A UPS keeps the node running in case ofpower failures. It is connected over Ethernet to the outdoorcommunity network node. This cloud nodes represents thecase of low-end cloud resources such as home gateways, thatusers provide to the cloud. These devices have been deployedthrough Community-Lab1 [4] and can be integrated in theGuifi network management platform [5]. Other cloud nodeswe have deployed are several Dell OptiPlex 7010 desktops. Inaddition, some Alix boards and Intel Galileo boards have beendeployed for specific purposes. While the number of deployedcloud resources in Guifi is in constant evolution, the status of1http://community-lab.net/Fig. 3. Cloud resource at a community network nodecloud deployment at time of this writing can be seen in theClommunity project’s Wiki2.C. Cloud Management PlatformSince the different local groups providing such microcloudsare independently organized, the cloud management platforms(CMP) that are used are also heterogeneous. In the commu-nity clouds we have deployed we use mainly Proxmox andOpenStack as CMP. The reason for using Proxmox is thatwithin the community network, there is already some positiveusage experience, and the installation and operation of Proxmoxis relatively easy compared to other CMPs. OpenStack onthe other hand, is popular as a powerful customizable cloudplatform, supported by a large user community, though notwithin community networks.D. Software DistributionWe provide a community cloud GNU/Linux distribution,codenamed Cloudy, aimed and designed for building clouds incommunity networks. This distribution contains the platformand application services of the community cloud model. Cloudyis deployed on the cloud resources that form the microcloudand over the different microclouds in the community network,as illustrated in Figure 4.I I I . S U P P O R T O F C O M M U N I T Y C L O U D S F O RE N E R G Y E F F I C I E N T S Y S T E M SIn this section we sketch a set of proposals on how to benefitfrom community clouds for building energy efficient systems.A. Energy-efficient resource allocationCommunity clouds are envisioned as a set of federatedmicroclouds. Microclouds are composed of heterogeneousdevices, which can range from resource-constrained homegateways up to server class desktops, even small crowd-fundeddata centres can be imagined. Depending on the service-levelagreements of the requested cloud service, different cloudresources may be able to fulfil the requirements.2http://wiki.clommunity-project.eu/testbed:startFig. 4. Cloudy distribution deployed in microcloudsIf an energy model of the different classes of cloud hardwareavailable in the community clouds is available, the most energyefficient cloud infrastructure may be selected to which this jobshould be allocated. An initial proof of concept of such asystem could be studied on a single heterogeneous microcloud.The level of federation support of the used CMP may allowextending such energy-efficient resource allocation over severalmicroclouds.In this scenario, the heterogeneity of community cloudhardware plays an essential role. Such energy-efficient resourceallocation may be less applicable in commercial cloud systemswhere the hardware is more homogeneous.B. Cloud computing with low-power devicesDifferent research initiatives, e.g. the Montblanc project3,consider building energy-efficient cloud computing infrastruc-tures with low-power devices.Community cloud contributors are expected to target cloudhardware deployed on their premises which has a low energyconsumption, for being able to run in a 24/7 mode withoutnoticeable electricity consumption increase. Therefore, such acloud scenario built upon many distributed low-power devicescould be materialized by a user-provisioned cloud infrastruc-tures in community clouds.In order for such a scenario to be explored, CMPs needto be evaluated towards their capacity to support hypervisorsolutions which may not require hardware supported virtualiza-tion. Several low-power devices have already been deployedin Community-Lab [4], making the hardware to explore thisscenario mainly available.C. Smart Grid supportSmart Grid scenarios build upon advanced metering andcommunication infrastructures, which enable to take moreenergy-efficient decisions on power consumption. For suchscenarios, computational infrastructure is needed to processlarge amounts of data generated by electrical meters and com-bine it with additional contextual information. Such processingcould leverage on community cloud hardware and services, and3http://www.montblanc-project.eu/reduce the need of infrastructure that utility providers need todeploy in the last mile of the Smart Grid [6]. For furtherexploration of this scenario, the requirements of Smart Gridplatforms need to be assessed. The community cloud which weconsider does principally allow to deploy customized PaaS orintegrate additional services into the Cloudy distribution, whichmay allow easier exploration than through closed commercialenvironments.I V. C O N C L U S I O NThe appearance of clouds in community networks can bewitnessed nowadays. Such clouds consist of user contributedinfrastructures which enable cloud-based services; the cloudhardware is often located at the user premises. Such communityclouds offer unique features compared to commercial datacentre type clouds, such as distributed and heterogeneoushardware, user-managed services and services of communityinterest. This paper sketches some opportunities which com-munity clouds could offer to contribute to energy efficientsystems. These opportunities are described towards energy-efficient resource allocation, clouds made out of low-powerdevices, and supporting the deployment of the Smart Grid.A C K N O W L E D G M E N TThis work was supported by the European CommunityFramework Programme 7 FIRE Initiative projects CLOMMU-NITY, FP7-317879, and Community Networks Testbed for theFuture Internet (CONFINE), FP7-288535.R E F E R E N C E S[1] “Guifi.net new sections of fiber deployed to the farm, 2012.” [Online].Available: http://en.wikinoticia.com/Technology/internet/122595[2] P. Mell and T. Grance, “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,”NIST Special Publication, vol. 800, no. 145, 2011. [Online]. Available:http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf[3] A. Marinos and G. Briscoe, “Community Cloud Computing,” in CloudComputing, First International Conference, CloudCom 2009, ser. LectureNotes in Computer Science, M. Jaatun, G. Zhao, and C. Rong, Eds.Beijing, China: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Dec. 2009, vol. 5931, pp.472–484.[4] B. Braem, R. Baig Vin˜as, A. L. Kaplan, A. Neumann, I. Vilata i Balaguer,B. Tatum, M. Matson, C. Blondia, C. Barz, H. Rogge, F. Freitag, L. Navarro,J. Bonicioli, S. Papathanasiou, and P. Escrich, “A case for research withand on community networks,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer CommunicationReview, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 68–73, Jul. 2013.[5] J. Jime´nez, R. Baig, P. Escrich, A. M. Khan, F. Freitag, L. Navarro,E. Pietrosemoli, M. Zennaro, A. H. Payberah, and V. Vlassov, “Supportingcloud deployment in the Guifi.net community network,” in 5th GlobalInformation Infrastructure and Networking Symposium (GIIS 2013).Trento, Italy: IEEE, Oct. 2013.[6] L. Sharifi, F. Freitag, and L. Veiga, “Combining Smart Grid with Commu-nity Clouds: Next Generation Integrated Service Platform,” in 5th IEEEInternational Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGrid-Comm 2014). Venice, Italy: IEEE, Nov. 2014.

A look at energy efficient system opportunities with community network clouds

Community networking is an emerging model of a shared communication infrastructure in which communities of citizens build and own open networks. Community networks offer successfully IP-based networking to the user. In addition, some hosts are connected to the network nodes in order to provide network management and end user services. Recently, clouds have been proposed for community networks. Some research projects such as Clommunity have started deploying computational infrastructure to enable cloud computing within community networks. In this paper we propose different options for such community clouds to contribute to energy efficient systems, in particular regarding cloud-based services and in relation to Smart Grid. Further discussion and interaction with the research initiatives on energy efficient systems should identify the most promising approach and outline possible ways for implementation.Peer Reviewe

Baig, Roger

UPCommons

https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/2117/25058/1/EES-paper2.pdf

A look at energy efficient system opportunities with community network clouds

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC

UPCommons