As the Internet grows, the Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers tend to be more densely connected to the Internet to improve performance and redundancy, which leads to a flattening of the Internet topology at the autonomous system (AS) level. In this letter, we propose a method that quantifies the flattening feature in topological trend through exploiting network connectivity. Using this method, we analyze and compare the Internet AS graphs and synthetic topology models. The results reveal significant difference in flattening feature among these models and measured Internet AS graphs. This may help evaluate and improve the effectiveness of Internet topology simulation.
['Yangyang Wang', 'Keyao Zhang']
Quantifying the Flattening of Internet Topology