Abstract
During the last three decades the Internet has experienced fascinating evolution, both exponential growth in traffic and rapid expansion in topology. The size of the Internet becomes enormous, yet the network is very ‘small’ in the sense that it is extremely efficient to route data packets across the global Internet. This paper provides a brief review on three fundamental properties of the Internet topology at the autonomous systems (AS) level. Firstly the Internet has a power-law degree distribution, which means the majority of nodes on the Internet AS graph have small numbers of links, whereas a few nodes have very large numbers of links. Secondly the Internet exhibits a property called disassortative mixing, which means poorly-connected nodes tend to link with well-connected nodes, and vice versa. Thirdly the best-connected nodes, or the rich nodes, are tightly interconnected with each other forming a rich-club. We explain that it is these structural properties that make the global Internet so ‘small’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Quoitin, B., Pelsser, C., Swinnen, L.: Interdomain traffic engineering with BGP. IEEE Communications Magazine 41, 122–128 (2003)
Barabási, A., Albert, R.: Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286, 509 (1999)
Pastor-Satorras, R., Vespignani, A.: Evolution and Structure of the Internet - A Statistical Physics Approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2004)
Mahadevan, P., Krioukov, D., Fomenkov, M., Huffaker, B., Dimitropoulos, X., Claffy, K., Vahdat, A.: The internet AS-level topology: Three data sources and one definitive metric. Computer Comm. Rev. 36, 17–26 (2006)
Faloutsos, M., Faloutsos, P., Faloutsos, C.: On power–law relationships of the Internet topology. Computer Comm. Rev. 29, 251–262 (1999)
Pastor-Satorras, R., Vázquez, A., Vespignani, A.: Dynamical and correlation properties of the internet. Phys. Rev. Lett. 87 (2001)
Newman, M.E.J.: Mixing patterns in networks. Phys. Rev. E 67, 026126 (2003)
Zhou, S., Mondragón, R.J.: The rich-club phenomenon in the Internet topology. IEEE Comm. Lett. 8, 180–182 (2004)
Krioukov, D., Chung, F., Claffy, K., Fomenkov, M., Vespignani, A., Willinger, W.: The workshop on internet topology (WIT) report. Computer Comm. Rev. 37, 69–73 (2007)
Watts, D.J., Strogatz, S.H.: Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks. Nature 393, 440 (1998)
Zhou, S., Mondragón, R.: Structural constraints in complex networks. New Journal of Physics 9, 1–11 (2007)
Vázquez, A., Boguñá, M., Moreno, Y., Pastor-Satorras, R., Vespignani, A.: Topology and correlations in structured scale-free networks. Phys. Rev. E 67 (2003)
Maslov, S., Sneppenb, K., Zaliznyaka, A.: Detection of topological patterns in complex networks: correlation profile of the internet. Physica A 333, 529–540 (2004)
Floyd, S., Kohler, E.: Internet research needs better models. Computer Comm. Rev. 33, 29–34 (2003)
Tangmunarunkit, H., Govindan, R., Jamin, S., Shenker, S., Willinger, W.: Network topology generators: Degree-based vs. structural. In: Proc. ACM SIGCOMM, pp. 147–159 (2002)
Zhou, S., Mondragón, R.J.: Accurately modelling the Internet topology. Phys. Rev. E 70, 066108 (2004)
Dorogovtsev, S.N., Mendes, J.F.F.: Evolution of Networks - From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhou, S. (2009). Why the Internet Is So ‘Small’?. In: Mehmood, R., Cerqueira, E., Piesiewicz, R., Chlamtac, I. (eds) Communications Infrastructure. Systems and Applications in Europe. EuropeComm 2009. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 16. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11284-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11284-3_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11283-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11284-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)