Tahoe-LAFS Distributed Storage Service in Community Network Clouds

Community networks are successful large scale, decentralized IP networks, built and operated by citizens for citizens. Cloud computing infrastructures present in today´s Internet hardly exist in community networks. But the demand for cloud storage, and in particular secure cloud storage, increases also from within the communities. We deploy in community networks Tahoe-LAFS, a decentralized storage system with provider-independent security that guarantees privacy to the users. The correct functionality of Tahoe-LAFS in the community network is our first performance evaluation goal. Secondly, acceptable user experience is needed in order to make users willing to join the cloud, to create an eco-system around this cloud storage service. Our approach for the performance evaluation is to reproduce in our experimental scenario the real use case. We evaluate how the Tahoe-LAFS storage system performs when it is deployed over a WAN setting on cloud nodes in a community network. In experiments we characterize with different file sizes the upload and download times of Tahoe-LAFS, in relation to the bandwidth and latency between the client and the storage nodes. While we observe higher upload and faster download times, Tahoe-LAFS performed correctly in the challenging environment of the community network. Our results suggest Tahoe-LAFS as a promising application for privacy-preserving, secure and fault-tolerant cloud-based storage services in community networks.