A social compute cloud: Allocating and sharing infrastructure resources via social networks

Social network platforms have rapidly changed the way that people communicate and interact. They have enabled the establishment of, and participation in, digital communities as well as the representation, documentation and exploration of social relationships. We believe that as 'apps' become more sophisticated, it will become easier for users to share their own services, resources and data via social networks. To substantiate this, we present a social compute cloud where the provisioning of cloud infrastructure occurs through 'friend' relationships. In a social compute cloud, resource owners offer virtualized containers on their personal computer(s) or smart device(s) to their social network. However, as users may have complex preference structures concerning with whom they do or do not wish to share their resources, we investigate, via simulation, how resources can be effectively allocated within a social community offering resources on a best effort basis. In the assessment of social resource allocation, we consider welfare, allocation fairness, and algorithmic runtime. The key findings of this work illustrate how social networks can be leveraged in the construction of cloud computing infrastructures and how resources can be allocated in the presence of user sharing preferences.