The Diffusion of Networking Technologies (Sharon Goldberg, Zhenming Liu)
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There has been significant interest on the impact of cascade effects on the diffusion of networking technology upgrades in the Internet. Thinking of the global Internet as a graph, where each node represents an economically-motivated Internet Service Provider (ISP), a key problem is to determine the smallest set of nodes that can trigger a cascade that causes every other node in the graph to adopt the protocol. We design the first approximation algorithm with a provable performance guarantee for this problem, in a model that captures the following key issue: a node’s decision to upgrade should be influenced by the decisions of the remote nodes it wishes to communicate with.