Research Clouds: Hype or Reality?

Davide Guidi¹, Janko Mrsic-Flogel^{2 3}, John Darlington¹

In this paper we present an overview of Private Planet®, a sophisticated peer-to-peer computer architecture that provides the benefits of cloud computing solutions while preserving privacy aspects [1]. Private Planet® is the result of the Technology Strategy Board-funded project PEERSONA®, developed by Imperial College in collaboration with British Telecom, Dynamical Systems Research Ltd., Flight1 Software, O2, Peerouette Ltd., TelecityGroup and Transport for London.

In the Private Planet® vision users should not just “use” cloud computing, they should “own” cloud computing. With Private Planet®, each user owns a personal server, the planet, which is the heart of the user’s digital existence. User’s electronic devices, such as computers, laptops, mobile phones, music players, etc. can run a special client software that provides connection to the personal server.

The personal server offers three different kinds of functionalities:

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  Storage functionality, by allowing the user to store information that will be shared by any connected device. This functionality is at the core of cloud solutions such as Apple’s MobileMe [2] or the open source Funambol [3].
  
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  Processing functionality, by providing a remote infrastructure that can run software services that works 24/7 for the user.
  
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  Multiplexing functionality, by providing a uniform infrastructure that allows heterogeneous devices to easily interact.
  

A key aspect that differentiates Private Planet® from other cloud solution is that the personal server is entirely owned by the user. The fact that a user owns its personal server, however, does not imply that the user should be responsible for its maintenance, and physical possession (although this option is also possible). Instead, personal servers should be maintained by third parties organizations such as network operators and Internet Service Providers, which will be responsible for the their reliability, providing high bandwidth connection, etc. In this case multiple personal servers can be packed together in modulators, which allow to run a number of personal servers on one physical computer, as shown in Figure 2.

By satisfying certain requirements (such as to be always on, to have an appropriate network bandwidth allowance, etc), the planet will provide the novel feature of being a peer representing a persistent identity.

Private Planet® internals

In Private Planet®, applications are associated to services, which export functionalities by means of remote procedure calls (RPC). We choose RPC instead of other standards such as Web Services primarily because of its efficiency, which becomes important when working with computationally limited CPUs, such as with mobile phones.

Private Planet® provides a set of core services to handle system functionalities.

The Planet Disk service provides basic the functionality to access data in the personal server from any device.

The Snypp service is a generalization of the well-known copy&paste paradigm. Snypp allows users to copy information on a device and to paste information to another device. For example, the following examples have been shown at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress 2010:

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  Copy the location of a restaurant from a Web page on a PC and paste it to a Symbian Inbox (the information is received by the device and stored as SMS text message)
  

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  Snypp last photo taken from a Symbian device to a PC desktop
  

The Remote Access service is a prototype application that has been developed to test the device-to-device capabilities. This application consist of a user interface that shows the devices connected to the personal server. The interface is very similar to a Windows or Mac desktop, which shows device icons when a device is connected to the computer. In our prototype there are two device icons representing a mobile phone and a laptop computers. The icons are associated to some actions, for example the mobile phone is associated to “Get video from front camera”, “Get video from rear camera”, “Play music”, and so on. Because the Remote Access user interface is available to both devices, the same action can be requested from the two devices. By clicking on the mobile’s action “Get video from front camera“ on the phone itself, the output of the camera will be shown in the mobile’s screen. By clicking the same action on the PC, the output video of the mobile’s camera will be shown in the PC display.

Private Planet® has been presented for the very first time at the Mobile World Congress 2010. The Personal Server runs on a Linux server, and it support client applications written in a variety of programming languages. Currently applications can be written in C/C++ and Python, running on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. A wide range of mobile devices is also supported: Nokia Symbian devices, Nokia Maemo & Meego devices, Apple iPhone and Ipod touch. Other architectures and mobile devices will be added soon.

[1] “Personal Server and Network”, Patent application, Janko Mrsic-Flogel, William Yeager, Sakari Rahki

[2] Apple MobileMe homepage, http://www.apple.com/mobileme

[3] Funambol Open Source Mobile Cloud Sync and Push Email, http://www.funambol.com