A Critical Note on Social Cloud

TL;DR

This paper critically surveys social cloud research, highlighting the lack of a unified framework and emphasizing the need for a comprehensive model that captures its unique aspects and resource sharing mechanisms.

Contribution

It identifies gaps in current social cloud literature and advocates for developing a general framework to unify diverse views and resource sharing approaches.

Findings

Current social cloud systems lack a unified framework.

Significant differences exist in resource sharing and stakeholder roles.

A need for a comprehensive social cloud model is highlighted.

Abstract

The idea of a social cloud has emerged as a resource sharing paradigm in a social network context. Undoubtedly, state-of-the-art social cloud systems demonstrate the potential of the social cloud acting as complementary to other computing paradigms such as the cloud, grid, peer-to-peer and volunteer computing. However, in this note, we have done a critical survey of the social cloud literature and come to the conclusion that these initial efforts fail to offer a general framework of the social cloud, also, to show the uniqueness of the social cloud. This short note reveals that there are significant differences regarding the concept of social cloud, resource definition, resource sharing and allocation mechanism, and its application and stakeholders. This study is an attempt to express a need for a general framework of the social cloud, which can incorporate various views and resource sharing setups discussed in the literature.