Leveraging deployment models on low-resource devices for cloud services in community networks

Community networks are crowd-sourced IP networks that evolved into regional-scale computing platforms. This has led to adapting the cloud computing model for services that can operate and use computing resources inside a community network. The network and computing infrastructure is contributed by individuals, companies, organizations and maintained by its members. Community cloud devices are often low-capacity computing devices, such as home gateways or cabinet servers, with limited capabilities. These devices are used to install and operate specific personal or community services, but can be turned into multi-purpose execution environments applying machine or operating system (container) virtualization. However that requires addressing the problems of resource sharing in low-capacity devices, related to predictable performance and isolation. Our comparative analysis with the current infrastructure in community networks gives evidence about how devices can concurrently run multiple services, the trade offs between the number and resource requirements of services and the degradation of quality that services may suffer.