Performance evaluation of a distributed storage service in community network clouds

Community networks are self-organized and decentralized communication networks built and operated by citizens, for citizens. The consolidation of today's cloud technologies offers now, for community networks, the possibility to collectively develop community clouds, building upon user-provided...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Selimi, Mennan, Freitag, Fèlix|||0000-0001-5438-479X, Cerdà Alabern, Llorenç|||0000-0002-2799-6173, Veiga, Luis
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2015
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/89369
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/89369
https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.3658
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Ordinadors, Xarxes d' -- Aspectes socials
Cloud computing
Community networks
Community cloud
Cloud storage
Computació en núvol
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria de la telecomunicació::Telemàtica i xarxes d'ordinadors
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Sistemes d'informació::Emmagatzematge i recuperació de la informació
Descripción
Sumario:Community networks are self-organized and decentralized communication networks built and operated by citizens, for citizens. The consolidation of today's cloud technologies offers now, for community networks, the possibility to collectively develop community clouds, building upon user-provided networks and extending toward cloud services. Cloud storage, and in particular secure and reliable cloud storage, could become a key community cloud service to enable end-user applications. In this paper, we evaluate in a real deployment the performance of Tahoe least-authority file system (Tahoe-LAFS), a decentralized storage system with provider-independent security that guarantees privacy to the users. We evaluate how the Tahoe-LAFS storage system performs when it is deployed over distributed community cloud nodes in a real community network such as Guifi.net. Furthermore, we evaluate Tahoe-LAFS in the Microsoft Azure commercial cloud platform, to compare and understand the impact of homogeneous network and hardware resources on the performance of the Tahoe-LAFS. We observed that the write operation of Tahoe-LAFS resulted in similar performance when using either the community network cloud or the commercial cloud. However, the read operation achieved better performance in the Azure cloud, where the reading from multiple nodes of Tahoe-LAFS benefited from the homogeneity of the network and nodes. Our results suggest that Tahoe-LAFS can run on community network clouds with suitable performance for the needed end-user experience.