Social Cloud: Concept, Current Trends and Future Scope

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for Social Cloud, reviews existing setups and trends, and discusses future research challenges in distributed resource sharing based on social relationships.

Contribution

It introduces a general framework for Social Cloud and surveys current implementations, architectures, and research challenges in this emerging field.

Findings

Various Social Cloud setups and architectures are identified.

Current trends in Social Cloud research are summarized.

Research challenges and future directions are discussed.

Abstract

In recent years, various kinds of distributed resource sharing setups have been proposed by taking social relationships into consideration. These dissimilar resource sharing setups are tagged as Social Cloud. These setups have appeared in various distributed computing forms such as community cloud, grid, volunteer computing and network services. Such setups are discrete in nature, and hence, do not conceptualize the totality of the Social Cloud concept. In fact, it is difficult to conceptualize Social Cloud without a general framework. There are three main objectives of this work. First, to present a general framework of Social Cloud. Second, to report various Social Cloud setups with corresponding architectural prototypes and current trends. Third, to discuss research challenges.