Application Scenarios

25.2.2 Application Scenarios

Several possible application scenarios can be imagined for Cloud@Home: • Scientific research centers, communities – the Volunteer computing inspiration

of Cloud@Home provides means for the creation of open, interoperable Clouds for supporting scientific purposes, overcoming the portability and compatibil- ity problems highlighted by the @home projects. Similar benefits could be experienced in public administrations and open communities (social network, peer-to-peer, cloud gaming, etc). Through Cloud@Home it could be possible to implement resources and services management policies with QoS require- ments (characterizing the scientific project importance) and specifications (QoS classification of resources and services available). A new deal for Volunteer com- puting that does not take into consideration such aspect, following a best effort approach.

25 Cloud@Home 583 • Enterprises - planting a Cloud@Home computing infrastructure in busi-

ness/commercial locations can bring considerable benefits, especially in small and medium but also in big enterprises. It could be possible to implement own data center with local, existing, off the shelf, resources: usually in any enterprise there exist a capital of stand-alone computing resources for office automation, monitoring, designing and so on. Since such resources are only (partially) used in office hours, by Internet connecting them altogether it becomes possible to build up a Cloud@Home data center, in which allocate the shared services (web server, file server, archive, database, etc) without compatibility constraints or problems. The interoperability among Clouds allows to buy computing resources from commercial Cloud providers if needed or, otherwise, to sell the local Cloud computing resources to the same providers. This allows to reduce and optimize business costs according to QoS/SLA policies, improving performances and reli- ability. For example, this paradigm allows to deal with the flow peaks economy: data centers could be sized for the medium case, and worst cases (peaks) could

be managed by buying computing resources from Cloud providers. Moreover, Cloud@Home drives towards a resources rationalization: all the business pro- cesses can be securely managed by web, allocating resources and services where needed. In particular this fact can improve marketing and trading (E-commerce), making available to sellers and customers a lot of customizable services. The interoperability could also point out another scenario, in which private companies buy computing resources in order to resell them.

• Ad-hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, home automation - the Cloud com- puting approach, where both the software and the computing resources are owned and managed by the service providers, eases the programmers’ efforts in facing the device heterogeneity and prevents application downloads. Mobile applica- tion designers should start to consider that their applications, besides to be usable on a small device, will need to interact with the Cloud. Service discov- ery, brokering, and reliability are important, and services are usually designed to interoperate (The Programmable Web. http://www.programmableweb.com ). In order to consider the arising consequences related to the access of mobile users to service-oriented grid architecture, researchers have proposed new concepts such as the one of a mobile dynamic virtual organization (Waldburger & Stiller, 2006 ). New distributed infrastructures have been designed to facilitate the extension of Clouds to the wireless edge of the Internet. Among them, the Mobile Service Clouds enables dynamic instantiation, composition, configuration, and reconfig- uration of services on an overlay network to support mobile computing (Samimi, McKinley, & Sadjadi, 2006 ).

A still open research issue is whether or not a mobile device should be considered as a service provider of the Cloud itself. The use of modern mobile terminals such as smart-phones not just as Web Service requestors, but also as mobile hosts that can themselves offer services in a true mobile peer-to-peer setting is discussed in (Srirama, Jarke, & Prinz, 2006 ). Context aware operations involving control and monitoring, data sharing, synchronization, etc, could be implemented and exposed

584 S. Distefano et al. as Cloud@Home Web services involving wireless and Bluetooth devices, laptop,

Ipod, cellphone, household appliances, and so on. Cloud@Home could be a way for implementing Ubiquitous and Pervasive computing: many computational devices and systems can be engaged simultaneously for performing ordinary activities, and may not necessarily be aware that they are doing so.