[talks] 4:30pm Thu Apr 26 talk by Roch Guerin on user-provided connectivity in B-205

[Jennifer Rexford]

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.