Bandwidth-aware Service Placement in Community Network Clouds

Seamless computing and service sharing in community networks (CNs) have gained momentum due to the emerging technology of community network micro-clouds (CNMCs). However, deploying and running services in CNMCs confront enormous challenges to cope with, such as the dynamic nature of micro-clouds, limited capacity of nodes and links, asymmetric quality of wireless links, geographic singularity based deployment model rather than network QoS based, etc. CNMCs have been increasingly used by network-intensive services which exchange significant amounts of data between nodes, therefore their performance heavily relies on the available bandwidth resource in a network. This paper proposes a novel bandwidth-aware service placement algorithm which aims to replace the current random placement adopted by Guifi.net. Our experimental results show that the proposed BASP algorithm consistently outperforms the random placement in Guifi.net by 35% regarding its bandwidth gain. More promisingly, as the number of services increases, the gain tends to increase accordingly. Furthermore, we quantify the performance and effects of our algorithm with a real service such as live video-streaming service, in a real production CN. Our real experimental results show that when using our BASP algorithm, the video chunk loss in the peer side decreases up to 3%.