Comparing Trade-off Based Models of the Internet

We introduce and evaluate several new models of network growth. Our models are extensions of the FKP model, modifying and improving it in various dimensions. In all these models nodes arrive one by one, and each node is connected to previous nodes by optimizing a trade-off between a geometric objective (“last mile cost”) and a topological objective (“position in the network”). Our new models differ from the original FKP model in directions inspired by the real Internet: two or more edges are attached to each arriving node (while the FKP model produces a tree); these edges are chosen according to various criteria such as robustness; edges may be added to the network between old nodes; or only certain “fertile” nodes (an attribute that changes dynamically) are capable of attracting new edges. We evaluate these models, and compare them with the graph of the Internet’s autonomous systems, with respect to a suite of many test parameters (such as average degree, power law exponent, and local clustering rank) proposed in the literature; to this end we have developed the network generation and measurement system Pandora.