Network topologies, power laws, and hierarchy

It has long been thought that the Internet, and its constituent networks, are hierarchical in nature. Consequently, the network topology generators most widely used by the Internet research community, GT-ITM [7] and Tiers [11], create networks with a deliberately hierarchical structure. However, recent work by Faloutsos et al. [13] revealed that the Internet's degree distribution -- the distribution of the number of connections routers or Autonomous Systems (ASs) have -- is a power-law. The degree distributions produced by the GT-ITM and Tiers generators are not power-laws. To rectify this problem, several new network generators have recently been proposed that produce more realistic degree distributions; these new generators do not attempt to create a hierarchical structure but instead focus solely on the degree distribution. There are thus two families of network generators, structural generators that treat hierarchy as fundamental and degree-based generators that treat the deg...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CCR
• Authors: Hongsuda Tangmunarunkit, Ramesh Govindan, Sugih Jamin, Scott Shenker, Walter Willinger
• Keywords: CCR 2002, Degree Distribution, Generators, Internet