Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 215, 145-151 (2013)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2013-01721-7

Regular Article

Modeling access network: Maximum node-degree determines the traffic of the internet

¹ Center for Networked System, School of Computer Science, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu 610500, PR China
² State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu 610500, PR China
³ Center for Computational Systems Biology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, PR China

^a e-mail: carly_chen@126.com
^b e-mail: jzhang080@gmail.com
^c e-mail: dping.li@gmail.com

Received: 30 July 2012
Revised: 29 November 2012
Published online: 29 January 2013

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that both routers and domains in the Internet have a scale-invariant fractal structure. However, nodes in access network (AN) level are found demonstrate a random geographic distribution. In this paper, we investigate the AN by proposing a model in which the nodes are randomly posited at given regions. In particular, we design a new node-attachment strategy that can yield a connectivity pattern more consistent with real configuration. Taking into account of both the geographical distribution of the nodes and specific local connectivity, our model can therefore serve as more accurate description of real-world Internet. We furthermore use this model to study the traffic load of the Internet, and we found that the optimal betweenness centrality variance and average path length, which is associated with an optimal traffic load, can be obtained by setting a suitable maximum degree K_max for the AN. Our results indicates that the optimal value of K_max increases linearly with the number of nodes, which provide useful guidance to improve throughput and transmission efficiency when designing the access network.