Cloud-Based Extension for Community-Lab

Community-Lab is an open, distributed infrastructure for researchers to carry out experiments within wireless community networks. Community networks are an emergent model of infrastructures built with off-the-shelf communication equipment that aims to satisfy a community's demand for Internet access and ICT services. Community-Lab consists of more than 100 nodes that are integrated in existing community networks, thus giving researchers access to community networks and allowing them to conduct experimental evaluation of routing protocols, services and applications deployed there. Community networks have now the opportunity to extend the collaborative network building to the next level, that is, building collaborative services implemented as community clouds, built, operated and maintained by the community, that run on community-owned heterogeneous resources, and offer cloud-based services that are of the community's interest. This demo paper focuses on demonstrating the cloud extension of Community-Lab, enabling now community cloud experiments. By means of selected applications, we show how Community-Lab has been extended with distributed clouds, where different devices such as server, desktop PCs, low-resource embedded PCs and IoT boards are brought together forming a heterogeneous distributed cloud environment for researchers to experiment in community networks.