Abstract

Recent studies have shown that Internet graphs and other network systems follow power-laws. Do artificial network topologies commonly used in network simulation studies obey these power-laws? In this paper we show that current topology generators do not obey all of the power-laws, and we present two new topology generators that do. Finally, we re-evaluate a multicast study to demonstrate the impact of power-law topologies. 1 Introduction Recent studies have shown that Internet graphs follow power laws [5]---i.e., certain graph metrics follow the distribution y / x ff . This phenomenon has been observed in router topology, inter-domain topology [5], and the world-wide-web [1, 2, 6, 7, 8]. Previous metrics used to characterize Internet graphs have focussed on averages: for example, average out-degree of routers. While these metrics are important, they do not capture higher-order properties such as the power-laws. Network studies often simulate artificial network topologies to evalua...

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