Community home gateways for P2P clouds

Abstract

P2P based clouds built with low-end devices and voluntarily contributed resources have been proposed by several authors. While some work was published on architectures and decentralized P2P-based mechanisms for such clouds, yet no complete system has been presented which implements such cloud systems without important limitations. We present the community home gateway, a computer system attached to a wireless community network router, able to host platform and application services. Different to current home gateways and other low-end systems, the community home gateway offers resource virtualization, and can thus be used as cloud resource. The community home gateway removes the lack of a system open for service contributions and therefore constitutes an important step for researchers and developers towards building P2P clouds with low-end devices. While we present the community home gateway as being part of a P2P community cloud, the applications scenarios of the system that can be imagined go beyond community networks.