A Framework for Measuring the Deployment of Internet Protocols

Internet protocols spread to potential adopters through several successive phases of implementation, commercialization, acquisition, and adoption of the protocol. This process of protocol deployment involves several stakeholders and varies depending on the deployment environment and the protocol in question. This complexity and the lack of comprehensive measurement studies call for a further conceptualization of measuring protocol diffusion along the whole deployment process. Therefore, this article develops a framework for measuring the deployment of Internet protocols, consisting of deployment steps, deployment models, deployment measures, and data sources. The measures are further linked to each other through deployment gaps and delays. In order to demonstrate the framework, it is used to assess how a set of pre-installed protocols spread in the Finnish mobile market. The framework highlights the differences between the deployment models and the importance to use both the deployment measures and gaps in the analysis of protocol success. Furthermore, the illustrative results indicate that protocol deployment is driven by applications, and show the existence of large deployment gaps between the protocol possession and usage. The results are relevant especially to researchers interested in holistically analyzing protocol deployment and protocol developers for measuring and improving the success of their protocols.