Internet Topology

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Internet Topology deals with finding the structure of the internet. It is daunting to map the entire hierarchy due to the rate at which the network is growing. The effort to map the Internet is usually incomplete and out of date the moment it appears. Internet topology has attracted interest from various disciplines including mathematical sciences, computer science and physics.

The networking researcher's motivation for studying Internet-specific topologies is to enable prediction of how new technologies, policies, or economic conditions will impact the Internet’s connectivity structure at different layers, whereas a physicist is interested in studying the internet as any other complex network. This has led to many models being proposed including the Jellyfish model to physically represent the structure of the internet.^[1]

Fortunately, nobody owns the Internet, there is no centralized control, and nobody can turn it off. Its evolution depends on rough consensus about technical proposals, and on running code. Engineering feed-back from real implementations is more important than any architectural principles.

– B.Carpenter, Architectural Principles of the Internet; June, 1996.

[edit] Internet Architecture

Internet's architecture can be likened to that of a river system with small tributaries feeding medium-level streams which in turn feed rivers. The modular design of the internet is based on a dual decomposition of functionality - a vertical separation into layers and a horizontal decentralization across network components. This is manifested in the TCP/IP protocol stack. A manifestation of the Internet's horizontal decomposition is how this large-scale physical infrastructure is organized into Autonomous System^[2]