Graph community detection applied to guide service placement in community network micro-clouds.

What is it about?

Guifi.net is a technological, social and economic project by worldwide collaborators with the goal of creating an open, free and neutral telecommunication network. It is an example of what is known as a community network micro-cloud (CNMC), where different services such as email, file storage and streaming (among others) are enabled by the collaborative effort of individuals who contribute with their hardware and computational resources to form the network. As such a network has several nodes and collaborators are free to join, different web applications and services must be appropriately placed on elected leader nodes to improve the quality-of-service (QoS) for the people who use the network. In this work, we explore how techniques from graph theory focused on community detection may guide and improve the leader election challenge in a way that optimizes the services offered by the network.

Featured Image

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We live In a world where more and more devices will become participants in the Internet at different scopes. To increase the service quality for users of all kinds, it becomes important to study techniques to improve different kinds of networks (with varying levels of decentralization). Decentralized networks (although not purely peer-to-peer) offer the possibility to reduce the impact of single-point-of-failure problems and to increase performance in network configuration and service configuration (e.g., email protocols, file storage, streaming, etc.). In this regard, we explore the guifi.net community network micro-cloud, a network for which the contribution of the participants is essential, as a way to deepen our understanding on how such improvements may potentially be applied to other types of networks.

Perspectives