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Published 2006 | public
Book Section - Chapter

An optimization-based approach to modeling internet topology

Abstract

Over the last decade there has been significant interest and attention devoted towards understanding the complex structure of the Internet, particularly its topology and the large-scale properties that can be derived from it. While recent work by empiricists and theoreticians has emphasized certain statistical and mathematical properties of network structure, this article presents an optimization-based perspective that focuses on the objectives, constraints, and other drivers of engineering design. We argue that Internet topology at the router-level can be understood in terms of the tradeoffs between network performance and the technological and economic factors constraining design. Furthermore, we suggest that the formulation of corresponding optimization problems serves as a reasonable starting point for generating "realistic, yet fictitious" network topologies. Finally, we describe how this optimization-based perspective is being used in the development of a still-nascent theory for the Internet as a whole.

Additional Information

© 2006 Springer. The ideas presented in this article have benefitted tremendously from conversations with many colleagues, including Steven Low, Ramesh Govindan, Matt Roughan, and Reiko Tanaka. The authors would like to express special thanks to Stanislav Shalunov for help in understanding the physical design of the Abilene backbone. This research was sponsored in part by the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA, as part of their program on Large-Scale Communication Networks.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
January 13, 2024