In this day and age, lots of bandwidth is consumed by the delivery of Web content, such as file sharing via peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and video streaming. Internet service providers are feeling the pressure to deliver such multimedia content to the consumer more quickly, while reducing costs. This paper discusses the creation of a storage cloud using edge devices based on P2P resource provisioning.

This paper presents a vague design, implementation, and evaluation of a storage cloud using the STACEE edge devices concept. The term “edge devices” originated in telecommunications and refers to routers, routing switches, and multiplexers. Mobile phones, personal computers and media centers, set-top boxes, modems, and networked storage devices also fall under this category. The authors explore the issue of quality of service (QoS) and QoS-aware scheduling in a P2P storage cloud. The technique is noble in the sense that it is fully transparent and does not require any modifications to Internet protocols. Hence, it can be readily deployed. A more formal definition of edge device could have been helpful.

The paper does not offer details of a working example. Some concerns that need to be addressed further include the possibility of a single point of failure at one of the edge devices and how such a failure would affect data retrieval. Another concern is clustering the devices to achieve high availability. Can these edge devices belong to different vendors? Can one manage all the edge devices centrally? In addition to these questions, there are security issues, such as the need for patching devices such as cable modems and wireless routers.

This could be a revolutionary idea, provided one could design a system that could guarantee an uptime of five nines (that is, one that is available 99.999 percent of the time, which translates to 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, 25.9 seconds of downtime per month, or 6.05 seconds of downtime per week). This is a revolutionary idea because right now we have different edge devices made by various manufacturers; integrating them is not only a challenge, but one that requires cooperation among the stakeholders for the common good.

Overall, I found this paper on a method for storing data using edge devices to be an interesting read.