Analyzing the evolution of the Internet topology from a hierarchical flow perspective
Nakata Yu, Shin’ichi Arakawa, Masayuki Murata · IEICE Technical Report; IEICE Tech. Rep. · 2013
The scale of topology in the Internet is becoming larger corresponding to increase of traffic demand. Understanding how the AS level topology has been evolving is important for network design and analyzing performance of applications and protocols. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the Internet topology. In particular, we focus on the flow hierarchy in the Internet topology, which describes where ASes accommodating heavy traffic are in the topology. The flow hierarchy is the hierarchical structure derived from recursively splitting the topology into some subset of ASesa that are densely connected with many links. Our finding is that the width of the containment hierarchy is becoming larger, but the depth of the containment hierarchy is almost constant. This fact suggests that a part of ASes aggregates more amount of traffic and suffers from overload. Furthermore, we show that more traffic tends to be aggregated at the links in second level of flow hierarchy.