The SmartenIT booth at the Future Internet Assembly Dublin is the perfect opportunity to learn about the project. Visit our booth and experience a live demonstration of an example application of use within SmartenIT:
PiCsMu (Platform Independent Cloud Storage for Multiple Usage).
SmartenIT Demonstrator
PiCsMu is a file storage and file sharing application with a hybrid approach: centralized for private storage and decentralized (Peer-to-peer) for file sharing. While files' index information is maintained in the PiCsMu overlay, files' data is stored in the underlay, composed by multiple Cloud services. PiCsMu is independent of allowed file formats, meaning that, e.g., a PDF can be stored anywhere, even in Cloud services that only accept one specific file format. PiCsMu enhances security and privacy by employing three steps to upload a file:
- Fragmentation (splitting files into several file parts)
- Encryption (encrypting each file part)
- Data encoding (injecting each encrypted file part into a file format that will be accepted to the Cloud service), and
- Upload data to Cloud services.
Therefore, for example, a PDF file can be split into several file parts, encrypted, encoded into MP3, JPG, or PNG files (e.g., using Steganography), and these encoded file parts are then uploaded to several Cloud services that accept such file formats (e.g., SoundCloud for MP3, Google Picasa for JPG, and Dropbox for PNG). The result of these 4 steps turn the process of reassembling the original file a highly complex task for users that are not meant to access the original file data.
"The relevance of PiCsMu to the SmartenIT project relies on providing social awareness, global service mobility, and Cloud information. Thus, PiCsMu would be able to optimally select which Cloud services are located closer to the user in order to upload the encoded file parts - enhancing Quality-of-Experience and optimize traffic."
(Guilherme Sperb Machado, researcher in the SmartenIT project and main developer of PiCsMu)
SmartenIT Project
The SmartenIT project investigates a socially-aware management of new overlay application traffic combined with energy efficiency in the Internet. The tighter integration of network management, overlay service functionality, and overlay application knowledge, as for instance of Online Social Networks and Quality-of-Experience metrics, can lead to cross-layer optimization of network operations. Therefore, SmartenIT considers this as the promising approach to offer a new business potential in operational perspectives for all stakeholders involved, including cloud providers, Internet Service Providers, telecommunication providers, overlay providers, and application providers.
By addressing accordingly load and traffic patterns of the Internet traffic or special application requirements and by exploiting them at the same time with respect to social awareness (in terms of user relations and interests), QoE-awareness, and energy efficiency with respect to both end-user devices and underlying networking infrastructure, SmartenIT is dedicated to ensure an operationally efficient management of traffic, exemplified with real-life scenarios.
