Measuring the QoS of Personal Cloud Storage

Nowadays, the Personal Cloud Storage (PCS) service has been widely utilized by millions of users, not only because of its reliable ubiquitous storage but also numbers of exciting third-part applications that work as overlay networks based on user´s data. However, we usually know few information about the PCS´s performance which is quite important for both normal users and programmers. In this paper, we present a measurement study of four popular PCS services: Baidu, Kingsoft, Box and DropBox. By using the REST APIs offered by the storage providers, we collected the information from more than 41,000 storage operations with transferring over 200GB files, characterized the file transfer speed distributions, and analyzed important aspects that impact the file transfer speed. Indeed, we found some important characteristics in China that are different from the situations in the USA and Europe, which is significant. We believe our work can contribute to helping the researchers and developers to understand the behavior of these popular storage services.