Eur. Phys. J. B 74, 271-278 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-00057-x

Evolution of the Internet AS-level ecosystem

¹ Department of ECE, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3128, USA
² Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0505, USA

Corresponding author: dima@caida.org

Received: 16 July 2009
Revised: 9 December 2009
Published online: 16 February 2010

Abstract

We present an analytically tractable model of Internet evolution at the level of autonomous systems (ASs). We call our model the multiclass preferential attachment (MPA) model. As its name suggests, it is based on preferential attachment. All of its parameters are measurable from available Internet topology data. Given the estimated values of these parameters, our analytic results predict a definitive set of statistics characterizing the AS topology structure. These statistics are not part of the model formulation. The MPA model thus closes the “measure-model-validate-predict” loop, and provides further evidence that preferential attachment is a driving force behind Internet evolution.