There are few studies that look closely at how the topology of the Internet
evolves over time; most focus on snapshots taken at a particular point in time.
In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the topology of the Autonomous
Systems graph of the Internet, examining how eight commonly-used topological
measures change from January 2002 to January 2010. We find that the
distributions of most of the measures remain unchanged, except for average path
length and clustering coefficient. The average path length has slowly and
steadily increased since 2005 and the average clustering coefficient has
steadily declined. We hypothesize that these changes are due to changes in
peering policies as the Internet evolves. We also investigate a surprising
feature, namely that the maximum degree has changed little, an aspect that
cannot be captured without modeling link deletion. Our results suggest that
evaluating models of the Internet graph by comparing steady-state generated
topologies to snapshots of the real data is reasonable for many measures.
However, accurately matching time-variant properties is more difficult, as we
demonstrate by evaluating ten well-known models against the 2010 data.
%0 Generic
%1 Edwards2012
%A Edwards, Benjamin
%A Hofmeyr, Steven
%A Stelle, George
%A Forrest, Stephanie
%D 2012
%K graphs internet network_analysis web
%T Internet Topology over Time
%U http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.3993v1
%X There are few studies that look closely at how the topology of the Internet
evolves over time; most focus on snapshots taken at a particular point in time.
In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the topology of the Autonomous
Systems graph of the Internet, examining how eight commonly-used topological
measures change from January 2002 to January 2010. We find that the
distributions of most of the measures remain unchanged, except for average path
length and clustering coefficient. The average path length has slowly and
steadily increased since 2005 and the average clustering coefficient has
steadily declined. We hypothesize that these changes are due to changes in
peering policies as the Internet evolves. We also investigate a surprising
feature, namely that the maximum degree has changed little, an aspect that
cannot be captured without modeling link deletion. Our results suggest that
evaluating models of the Internet graph by comparing steady-state generated
topologies to snapshots of the real data is reasonable for many measures.
However, accurately matching time-variant properties is more difficult, as we
demonstrate by evaluating ten well-known models against the 2010 data.
@misc{Edwards2012,
abstract = { There are few studies that look closely at how the topology of the Internet
evolves over time; most focus on snapshots taken at a particular point in time.
In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the topology of the Autonomous
Systems graph of the Internet, examining how eight commonly-used topological
measures change from January 2002 to January 2010. We find that the
distributions of most of the measures remain unchanged, except for average path
length and clustering coefficient. The average path length has slowly and
steadily increased since 2005 and the average clustering coefficient has
steadily declined. We hypothesize that these changes are due to changes in
peering policies as the Internet evolves. We also investigate a surprising
feature, namely that the maximum degree has changed little, an aspect that
cannot be captured without modeling link deletion. Our results suggest that
evaluating models of the Internet graph by comparing steady-state generated
topologies to snapshots of the real data is reasonable for many measures.
However, accurately matching time-variant properties is more difficult, as we
demonstrate by evaluating ten well-known models against the 2010 data.
},
added-at = {2012-02-20T14:23:17.000+0100},
author = {Edwards, Benjamin and Hofmeyr, Steven and Stelle, George and Forrest, Stephanie},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2bd8ea1580b588434dba0678106866229/maxirichter},
description = {Internet Topology over Time},
interhash = {8134e7e3313a4e81291e79c49c92c65b},
intrahash = {bd8ea1580b588434dba0678106866229},
keywords = {graphs internet network_analysis web},
note = {cite arxiv:1202.3993Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures},
timestamp = {2012-02-20T14:23:17.000+0100},
title = {Internet Topology over Time},
url = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.3993v1},
year = 2012
}