Sen, Soumya
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Publication Modeling the dynamics of network technology adoption and the role of converters(2009-06-22) Sen, Soumya; Guérin, Roch; Hosanagar, Kartik; Jin, YoungmiNew network technologies constantly seek to displace incumbents. Their success depends on technological superiority, the size of the incumbent's installed base, users' adoption behaviors, and various other factors. The goal of this paper is to develop an understanding of competition between network technologies, and identify the extent to which different factors, in particular converters (a.k.a. gateways), affect the outcome. Converters can help entrants overcome the influence of the incumbent's installed base by enabling cross-technology inter-operability. However, they have development, deployment, and operations costs, and can introduce performance degradations and functionality limitations, so that if, when, why, and how they help is often unclear. To this end, the paper proposes and solves a model for adoption of competing network technologies by individual users. The model incorporates a simple utility function that captures key aspects of users' adoption decisions. Its solution reveals a number of interesting and at times unexpected behaviors, including the possibility for converters to reduce overall market penetration of the technologies and to prevent convergence to a stable state; something that never arises in their absence. The findings were tested for robustness, e.g., different utility functions and adoption models, and found to remain valid across a broad range of scenarios.Publication On the Economic Viability of Network Systems and Architectures(2011-05-16) Sen, SoumyaUnderstanding the relationship between technology and economics is fundamental to making judicious policy and design decisions. Many technologies that are successful in meeting their technical goals often fail to get adopted due to economic factors. This holds true even for networked systems, e.g., the Internet, which witnessed failures in the adoption of QoS solutions, IPv6 migration etc., due to factors such as high costs, lack of demand, and weight of incumbency. To gain better insights into these issues, researchers need access to analytical frameworks that account for both technological and economic factors and provide useful design guidelines. This dissertation was motivated primarily by the need to undertake such a holistic, multidisciplinary approach towards creating such analytical frameworks. We focus on three important aspect related to deployment, adoption, and design of network systems and architectures. The Internet has been one of the most successful network technologies, serving both as a shared platform for easy deployment of new services and a driver for their adoption. But recent trends in convergence of voice, video, and data services, along with advances in virtualization technologies, raise questions as to whether deploying heterogeneous services on a shared network is right or not, especially given the operational complexity and costs involved. We develop a model to investigate the trade-offs between shared and dedicated infrastructures and identify the operational metrics that influence which infrastructure choice benefits more from resource reprovisioning. Closely related to the issue of network service deployment is that of its successful adoption, which serves as the second topic of this dissertation. An entrant’s success hinges not only on technical superiority but also on other factors, including its ability to win over an incumbent’s installed base by using gateways. Our model for adoption of competing technologies reveals several interesting behaviors, including the possibility for converters to reduce overall market penetration across both technologies and to prevent the convergence of the adoption process to a stable state. Lastly, we consider the issue of network platform design. The emergence and adoption of new technologies depend on the functional capabilities provided by the underlying network platform. Answering whether the minimalist design of Internet is still relevant as it evolves into an ecosystem of software services, require a cost-benefit analysis of choosing between a functionality-rich and a minimalist design. We develop a two-sided market model to show how this design choice crucially depends on the relationship between the cost of adding features to the platform and the benefits that application developers derive from them. The frameworks developed in this dissertation have the potential for application in many different network settings, and can spur further research on various topics in network economics.Publication Functionality-rich Versus Minimalist Platforms: A Two-sided Market Analysis(2011-07-24) Sen, Soumya; Guérin, Roch A; Hosanagar, KartikShould a new ``platform'' target a functionality-rich but complex andexpensive design or instead opt for a bare-bone but cheaper one? This is afundamental question with profound implications for the eventual success ofany platform. A general answer is, however, elusive as it involves a complextrade-off between benefits and costs. The intent of this paper is tointroduce an approach based on standard tools from the fields of marketing andeconomics, which can offer some insight into this difficult question. Wedemonstrate its applicability by developing and solving a generic model thatincorporates key interactions between platform stakeholders. The solutionconfirms that the ``optimal'' number of features a platform should offerstrongly depends on variations in cost factors. More interestingly, it revealsa high sensitivity to small relative changes in those costs. The paper'scontribution and motivation are in establishing the potential of such across-disciplinary approach for providing qualitative and quantitativeinsights into the complex question of platform design.Publication The Impact of Reprovisioning on the Choice of Shared versus Dedicated Networks(2010-09-20) Sen, Soumya; Yamauchi, Kristin; Guerin, Roch; Hosanagar, KartikAs new network services emerge, questions about service deployment and network choices arise. Although shared networks, such as the Internet, offer many advantages, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not be the right answer as it comes at the cost of increased complexity. Moreover, deploying new services on dedicated networks is becoming increasingly viable, thanks to virtualization technologies. In this work, we introduce an analytical framework that gives Internet Service Providers the ability to explore the trade-offs between shared and dedicated network infrastructures. The framework accounts for factors such as the presence of demand uncertainty for new services, (dis)economies of scope in deployment and operational costs, and the extent to which new technologies allow dynamic (re)provisioning of resources in response to excess demands. The main contribution is the identification and quantification of dynamic (re)provisioning as a key factor in determining the preferred network infrastructure, i.e. shared or dedicated.Publication Message-Efficient Dissemination for Loop-Free Centralized Routing(2008-06-07) Sen, Soumya; Peterson, Haldane; Chandrashekar, Jaideep; Guérin, Roch A; Gao, Lixin; Zhang, Zhi-LiWith steady improvement in the reliability and performance of communication devices, routing instabilities now contribute to many of the remaining service degradations and interruptions in modern networks. This has led to a renewed interest in centralized routing systems that, compared to distributed routing, can provide greater control over routing decisions and better visibility of the results. One benefit of centralized control is the opportunity to readily eliminate transient routing loops, which arise frequently after network changes because of inconsistent routing states across devices. Translating this conceptual simplicity into a solution with tolerable message complexity is non-trivial. Addressing this issue is the focus of this paper. We identify when and why avoiding transient loops might require a significant number of messages in a centralized routing system, and demonstrate that this is the case under many common failure scenarios. We also establish that minimizing the number of required messages is NP-hard, and propose a greedy heuristic that we show to perform well under many conditions. The paper's results can facilitate the deployment and evaluation of centralized architectures by leveraging their strengths without incurring unacceptable overhead.Publication Dynamics of Competition Between Incumbent and Emerging Network Technologies(2008-06-20) Jin, Youngmi; Sen, Soumya; Guérin, Roch A; Hosanagar, kartik; Zhang, Zhi-LiThe Internet is by all accounts an incredible success, but in spite or maybe because of this success, its deficiencies have come under increasing scrutiny and triggered calls for new architectures to succeed it. Those architectures will, however, face a formidable incumbent in the Internet, and their ability to ultimately replace it is likely to depend equally on technical superiority as on economic factors. The goal of this paper is to start developing models that can help provide a quantitative understanding of a competition between the Internet and a new system, and show what factors affect it most strongly. A model for the adoption of competing network technologies by individual users is formulated and solved. It accounts for both the intrinsic value of each technology and the positive externalities derived from their respective numbers of adopters. Using this model, different configurations are explored and possible outcomes characterized. More importantly, configurations are identified where small differences in the attributes of either technology can lead to vastly different results. The paper provides initial results that can help identify parameters that significantly affect the likelihood of success of new network technologies.Publication Modeling the Dynamics of Network Technology Adoption and the Role of Converters(2010-04-09) Sen, Soumya; Jin, Youngmi; Guérin, Roch A.; Hosanagar, KartikNew network technologies constantly seek to displace incumbents. Their success depends on technological superiority, the size of the incumbent’s installed base, users’ adoption behaviors, and various other factors. The goal of this paper is to develop an understanding of competition between network technologies, and identify the extent to which different factors, in particular converters (a.k.a. gateways), affect the outcome. Converters can help entrants overcome the influence of the incumbent’s installed base by enabling cross-technology interoperability. However, they have development, deployment, and operations costs, and can introduce performance degradations and functionality limitations, so that if, when, why, and how they help is often unclear. To this end, the paper proposes and solves a model for adoption of competing network technologies by individual users. The model incorporates a simple utility function that captures key aspects of users’ adoption decisions. Its solution reveals a number of interesting and at times unexpected behaviors, including the possibility for converters to reduce overall market penetration of the technologies and to prevent convergence to a stable state; something that never arises in their absence. The findings were tested for robustness, e.g., different utility functions and adoption models, and found to remain valid across a broad range of scenarios.Publication Shared Versus Separate Networks - The Impact of Reprovisioning(2009-10-04) Sen, Soumya; Guérin, Roch A; Hosanagar, KartikAs networks improve and new services emerge, questions arise that affect service deployments and network choices. The Internet is arguably a successful example of a network shared by many services. However, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not always be the right answer, and technologies such as virtualization make deploying new services on separate networks increasingly more viable. So, which is the right option? The question is not unique to networks, and there is a large body of work in the manufacturing systems literature that explores the trade-off between flexible and dedicated plants. This paper highlights an important feature missing from these earlier works, namely, the ability to ``reprovision'' resources in response to changes in demand. It demonstrates that this feature alone can affect the choice of network solutions, and argues for models that incorporate it.