Amin M. Khan
Co-advisor: Felix
Freitag, UPC, Barcelona.
Managing Incentives in Community Network Clouds
Thesis submitted for the PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico
(IST), Universidade de Lisboa and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
Abstract
Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs for
communities to collaborate, leading to new services like
user-generated content and social computing, and through
collaboration, collectively built infrastructures like community
networks have also emerged. While community networks focus solely on
sharing of network bandwidth, community network clouds extend this
sharing to provide for applications of local interest deployed within
community networks through collaborative efforts to provision cloud
infrastructures. Community network clouds complement the traditional
large-scale public cloud providers similar to the model of
decentralised edge clouds by bringing both content and computation
closer to the users at the edges of the network. Community network
clouds are based on the principle of reciprocal sharing and most of
their users are moved by altruistic principles. However, as any other
human organisation, these networks are not immune to overuse,
free-riding, or under-provisioning, specially in scenarios where users
may have motivations to compete for scarce resources. We focus in
this thesis on the incentives based resource regulations mechanisms to
derive practical ways of implementing arbitration when such contention
for limited resources occurs. We first design these regulation
mechanisms for the local level where stronger social relationships
between the community members imply trust, and ensure adherence to the
system policies. We next extend the mechanisms for larger communities
of untrusted users, where rational users may be motivated to deviate
for their personal gains, and develop a distributed framework for
guaranteeing trust in the resource regulation. Such mechanisms assist
in encouraging contribution by the community members, and will help
towards adoption, sustainability, and growth of the community cloud
model.
Selected Publications
Note: Amin M. Khan was a student of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Distributed
Computing, working both at UPC, in Barcelona and at IST in
Lisboa. Here we just list the work that resulted from his stay at IST.
- Managing Incentives in Community Network
Clouds
- Amin M. Khan
- PhD Thesis. Departamento de
Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico
(IST), Universidade de Lisboa and Universitat
Politècnica de Catalunya.
- June, 2016.
- Available pdf.
- A Distributed Auctioneer for Resource Allocation in
Decentralized Systems.
- A. Khan, X. Vilaça,
L. Rodrigues, F. Freitag.
- In Proceedings of the 36th IEEE
International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, (ICDCS),
Nara, Japan, June 2016.
Luís Rodrigues