Towards Media Intercloud Standardization Evaluating Impact of Cloud Storage Heterogeneity

TL;DR

This paper examines the impact of storage heterogeneity on intercloud computing, analyzing key architectural components and evaluating major cloud storage services for their quality, efficiency, and design shortcomings.

Contribution

It provides a detailed discussion on intercloud architecture, highlights key issues including storage heterogeneity, and evaluates popular cloud services' performance and design limitations.

Findings

Storage heterogeneity affects intercloud service quality.

Major cloud services show varying levels of QoE and QoS.

Design shortcomings impact storage efficiency and user experience.

Abstract

Digital media has been increasing very rapidly, resulting in cloud computing's popularity gain. Cloud computing provides ease of management of large amount of data and resources. With a lot of devices communicating over the Internet and with the rapidly increasing user demands, solitary clouds have to communicate to other clouds to fulfill the demands and discover services elsewhere. This scenario is called intercloud computing or cloud federation. Intercloud computing still lacks standard architecture. Prior works discuss some of the architectural blueprints, but none of them highlight the key issues involved and their impact, so that a valid and reliable architecture could be envisioned. In this paper, we discuss the importance of intercloud computing and present in detail its architectural components. Intercloud computing also involves some issues. We discuss key issues as well and present impact of storage heterogeneity. We have evaluated some of the most noteworthy cloud storage services, namely Dropbox, Amazon CloudDrive, GoogleDrive, Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), Box, and SugarSync in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE), Quality of Service (QoS), and storage space efficiency. Discussion on the results shows the acceptability level of these storage services and the shortcomings in their design.