Cloud4Home -- Enhancing Data Services with @Home Clouds

Mobile devices, net books and laptops, and powerful home PCs are creating ever-growing computational capacity at the periphery of the Internet, and this capacity is supporting an increasingly rich set of services, including media-rich entertainment and social networks, gaming, home security applications, flexible data access and storage, and others. Such ´at the edge´ capacity raises the question, however, about how to combine it with the capabilities present in the cloud computing infrastructures residing in data center systems and reachable via the Internet. The Cloud4Home project and approach presented in this paper addresses this topic, by enabling and exploring the aggregate use of @home and @datacenter computational and storage capabilities. Cloud4Home uses virtualization technologies to create content storage, access, and sharing services that are fungible both in terms of where stored objects are located and in terms of where they are manipulated. In this fashion, data services can provide low latency response to @home events as well as high throughput response when the higher and less predictable latencies of data center access can be tolerated. Cloud4Home is implemented with the Xen open source hypervisors for standard x86-based mobile to server platforms, and is evaluated using sample applications based on home security and video conversion services.