A First Principles Approach to Understanding the Internet’s Router-level Topology

The authors in this paper argue that previous researchers who have analyzed the structure of Internet topology have not considered factors like router technology and network economics. There can be other key factors that affect the structure and should be taken into consideration along with using statistics and graph theory. The paper considers router capacity constraints, as well as likelihood to model router-level topologies and discuss understanding the evolution of networks in order to accurately model router-level graphs.

I agree with the arguments proposed by the authors. One thing that comes to my mind is how BGP is greatly influenced with the economic policies integrated in making route decisions. Thus, while understanding the Internet topology, router technology and network economics play an important role. The authors discuss different factors and also discuss the importance of robustness of the network to node /link failures. The authors do not discuss about this feature because of its complexity. It will be nice to discuss how robustness complicates the model and how much does it affect if not considered.