The "robust yet fragile" nature of the Internet

Date

2005

Authors

Doyle, J.
Alderson, D.
Li, L.
Low, S.
Roughan, M.
Shalunov, S.
Tanaka, R.
Willinger, W.

Editors

Advisors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Type:

Journal article

Citation

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, 2005; 102(41):14497-14502

Statement of Responsibility

John C. Doyle, David L. Alderson, Lun Li, Steven Low, Matthew Roughan, Stanislav Shalunov, Reiko Tanaka, and Walter Willinger

Conference Name

Abstract

The search for unifying properties of complex networks is popular, challenging, and important. For modeling approaches that focus on robustness and fragility as unifying concepts, the Internet is an especially attractive case study, mainly because its applications are ubiquitous and pervasive, and widely available expositions exist at every level of detail. Nevertheless, alternative approaches to modeling the Internet often make extremely different assumptions and derive opposite conclusions about fundamental properties of one and the same system. Fortunately, a detailed understanding of Internet technology combined with a unique ability to measure the network means that these differences can be understood thoroughly and resolved unambiguously. This article aims to make recent results of this process accessible beyond Internet specialists to the broader scientific community and to clarify several sources of basic methodological differences that are relevant beyond either the Internet or the two specific approaches focused on here (i.e., scale-free networks and highly optimized tolerance networks).

School/Discipline

Dissertation Note

Provenance

Description

Access Status

Rights

Copyright © 2005, The National Academy of Sciences

License

Grant ID

Call number

Persistent link to this record