Speaker: Roch Guerin, University of Pennsylvania Title: User-provided connectivity (UPC) services: A basic model and pricing strategies Date/time: 4:30pm Thursday, April 26th Room: B-205 in the E-Quad Host: Mung Chiang & Soumya Sen ABSTRACT: User-provided connectivity (UPC) services offer a possible alternative, or complement, to existing infrastructure-based connectivity. A user allows other users to occasionally connect through its ``home base'' in exchange for reciprocation, or possibly compensation. This service model exhibits strong positive and negative externalities. A large user base makes the service more attractive, as it offers more connectivity options to roaming users, but it also implies a greater volume of (roaming) traffic passing through a user's home base, which can increase congestion. These interactions make it difficult to predict the eventual success of such a service offering, and how to effectively price it. This work introduces a simple model that captures the main features of such a service, and uses it to investigate if and when it might succeed. The model is also used to develop insight and guidelines for pricing such a service. The robustness of the findings is tested numerically across a broad range of configurations that relax the model's many simplifying assumptions. Joint work with M. H. Afrasiabi BIO: Roch Guérin received an engineer degree from ENST, Paris, France, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Caltech. He joined the Electrical and System Engineering department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 as the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunications Networks. Prior to joining Penn, he spent many years at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in a variety of technical and management positions. From 2001 to 2004 he was on leave from Penn, starting Ipsum Networks, a company that pioneered the concept of route analytics for managing IP networks. Dr. Guérin has published extensively in international journals and conferences, and holds more than 30 patents. He has also been active in standard organizations such as the IETF where he has co-authored a number of RFCs. His research is in the general area of networked systems and applications, from wired and wireless networks to social networks, and encompasses both technical and “economic” factors that affect network evolution. Dr. Guérin has been an editor for several ACM and IEEE publications and in 2009 became the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He also served as General Chair or Program co-Chair for a number of ACM and IEEE sponsored conferences. Dr. Guérin is an ACM (2006) and IEEE (2001) Fellow. In 1994 he received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for his work on traffic management. He received the IEEE TCCC Outstanding Service Award in 2009, and was the recipient of the 2010 INFOCOM Achievement Award for “Pioneering Contributions to the Theory and Practice of QoS in Networks.” He was also the co-recipient of the 2010 INFOCOM Best Paper Award for the paper entitled “On the Feasibility and Efficacy of Protection Routing in IP Networks.” He was on the Technical Advisory Board of France Telecom for two consecutive terms from 2001 till 2006 and on the Technical Advisory Board of Samsung Electronics in 2003-2004. He joined the Scientific Advisory Board of Simula Research in 2010, and the Scientific Advisory Board of SITI (University Lusofona) in 2012.