Techno-economic feasibility analysis of Internet protocols: Framework and tools
Introduction
The Internet standardization community is very active in producing new Internet protocols as a response to the challenges with the existing protocols and the requirements of emerging application areas. For example, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has 127 active working groups that produced 337 working documents called as Request for Comments (RFC) during 2012 alone [1]. However, most of the new protocols never end up in use in the originally envisioned scale and scope [2]. Several reasons have been raised for explaining the lack of adoption, such as middleboxes blocking the traffic [2], difficulties in achieving critical mass [3], and lack of authorities that could mandate adoption [4]. The problems follow from the protocols being technically non-deployable or not providing sufficient economic incentives for the relevant stakeholders to implement, install, or adopt the protocol. In other words, the protocols are techno-economically infeasible.
One reason for the feasibility problems is that the protocol developers have insufficient understanding of the stakeholders' economic incentives, and thus end up designing protocols based on false or inaccurate assumptions. The IETF community has addressed this problem by identifying design principles [5], [6] and protocol success factors [7] that should facilitate adoption. However, the general design principles are not sufficient to guarantee the feasibility of a protocol since they neglect the special characteristics of each protocol and mainly cover technical deployment issues leaving aside the economic perspective.
Nevertheless, the understanding of the economic factors affecting the feasibility of Internet protocols has increased gradually in the recent years as the theories and methods of innovation diffusion research have been applied in Internet protocol case studies, such as the studies of DNSSEC [3] and IPv6 [8], [9]. Even though these studies suggest interesting deployment strategies and provide useful insights to the developers of future protocols, their usefulness remains limited due to two reasons. Firstly, these studies have been conducted separately from the protocol development after the protocol has already been standardized. Thus, the identified feasibility challenges cannot be taken into account in the protocol design. Secondly, they focus only on the feasibility for the potential end users of the protocol, although the success of the protocol also depends on other stakeholders, such as operating system (OS) vendors implementing and including the protocol in their operating systems.
To overcome the shortcomings of generic design principles and retrospective protocol case studies, this paper suggests an accessible and flexible framework for studying the feasibility of Internet protocols during their development. The framework is essentially a description of a systematic process for identifying the deployment challenges and suggesting strategic actions to improve feasibility. The perspective of the framework is techno-economic, as it aims to translate the technical design and protocol features into actual costs and benefits for the stakeholders. As such, it is targeted to protocol developers with limited knowledge of economics. The framework provides a set of questions grouped into different steps and is accompanied with a collection of tools that can be applied with the framework.
The framework is based on the experiences from multiple protocol case studies [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], including Multipath TCP (MPTCP), Mobile IP (MIP), Host Identity Protocol (HIP), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). In addition, a literature review has been conducted to acquire a comprehensive understanding of factors that contribute to the protocol adoption. Compared to the earlier retrospective case studies that focus on the feasibility for the potential adopters of the protocol, the framework takes a wider perspective by covering also the other critical steps in protocol deployment. Protocol deployment is defined as a process during which a protocol is advanced from the first specification into actual use on the Internet. The process includes steps such as implementation, installation, and adoption of the protocol and the related technical components. This extension is relevant since the protocol deployment needs to be feasible not only to the adopters, such as the end users of the protocol, but also to the other stakeholders participating in protocol deployment.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the reader to the innovation and protocol diffusion studies that create the basis for the framework. The framework is then described in Section 3. Section 4 introduces a multitude of analysis tools that can be used to answer the questions posed by Section 3. Then, Section 5 demonstrates the usage of the framework with the Multipath TCP (MPTCP) case study. Finally, Section 6 discusses the applicability and limitations of the framework.
Section snippets
Background and related work
Diffusion of innovations has already long inspired researchers of many disciplines. The literature regarding diffusion and adoption of innovations is vast and covers both single and multi-disciplinary perspectives. The techno-economic analysis of feasibility coincides with the diffusion studies, since the feasibility of an innovation defines the diffusion rate. This section gives an overview of the existing innovation diffusion literature that creates the basis for the framework.
Framework
Studying the techno-economic feasibility of a protocol under development is a challenging task, which culminates in understanding whether the relevant stakeholders – including both the actual end users and other stakeholders in the value network – have incentives for participating in protocol deployment. In order to answer this question, this section describes a framework consisting of six analysis steps as illustrated in Fig. 1.
Protocol specification works as the starting point for the
Tools
The framework in the previous section sets the guidelines for evaluating the feasibility of a protocol and lists potential tools that can be used in the course of the application of the framework. This section introduces these tools in more detail. Additionally, a comparison of the tools is provided in order to facilitate the choice of the most suitable tool depending on the modelers' techno-economic knowledge and available resources, for example. Please note that no tools are introduced for
Application of the framework — the case of Multipath TCP
In this section the framework is used for analyzing the feasibility of MPTCP, which is being developed by the MPTCP working group of the IETF. RFC 6182 [36] defines the architectural guidelines of MPTCP whereas RFC 6824 [63] contains the technical specification of the protocol. These documents work as a starting point for our analysis.
The purpose of this section is not to conduct in-depth analysis but to demonstrate the usage of the framework. Therefore, we refer heavily to our earlier MPTCP
Discussion
In this paper, a framework for studying the techno-economic feasibility of Internet protocols has been constructed and its application has been demonstrated with a protocol case. The appliers of the framework should keep a few issues in mind about its opportunities and limitations. Firstly, the framework is based on a limited number of protocol case studies conducted by the authors, which calls for further validation by wider audience. An initial validation has been conducted by university
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Thomas Casey, Heikki Hämmäinen, Kalevi Kilkki, Miika Komu, Oleksiy Mazhelis, and Timo Smura for their constructive comments. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful critique.
The work has been supported by the Internet of Things program of Tivit (Finnish Strategic Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation in the field of ICT), Graduate School in Electronics, Telecommunications and Automation (GETA), and the Future Internet Graduate School
Tapio Levä received his M.Sc. in communications engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), Finland, in 2009 with major in Networking Technology and minors in Telecommunications Management and Interactive Digital Media. He is currently doing postgraduate studies in the Department of Communications and Networking at Aalto University. His research interests include techno-economics of Internet architecture evolution, Internet standards adoption and information-centric networking.
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Tapio Levä received his M.Sc. in communications engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), Finland, in 2009 with major in Networking Technology and minors in Telecommunications Management and Interactive Digital Media. He is currently doing postgraduate studies in the Department of Communications and Networking at Aalto University. His research interests include techno-economics of Internet architecture evolution, Internet standards adoption and information-centric networking.
Henna Suomi received her M.Sc. in communications engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), Finland, in 2009 with major in Telecommunications Management and minor in Networking Technology. After working as a visiting researcher at McGill University she started doing her doctoral studies in the Department of Communications and Networking at Aalto University. Her current research interests include techno-economics of Internet architecture evolution, adoption of multipath protocols and economic effects of multihoming.