Bringing the Cloud to Rural and Remote Areas - Cloudlet by Cloudlet

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scalable, low-cost, and open hardware platform using small single-board computers to bring cloud services to rural and remote areas, enhancing availability and local community services.

Contribution

It introduces a novel micro-data center system based on inexpensive hardware that is extendable, scalable, and easy to deploy for rural cloud infrastructure.

Findings

Improved availability during network or power outages.

Cost-effective and low power consumption design.

Open and scalable system architecture.

Abstract

Instead of relying on huge and expensive data centers for rolling out cloud-based services to rural and remote areas, we propose a hardware platform based on small single-board computers. The role of these micro-data centers is twofold. On the one hand, they act as intermediaries between cloud services and clients, improving availability in the case of network or power outages. On the other hand, they run community-based services on local infrastructure. We illustrate how to build such a system without incurring high costs, high power consumption, or single points of failure. Additionally, we opt for a system that is extendable and scalable as well as easy to deploy, relying on an open design.