Mapping the Internet

Boguñá, M. et al. Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping. Nature Communications
Boguñá, M. et al. Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping. Nature Communications
(08/09/2010)

An article published in the online portal of the journal Nature Communications presents a method for mapping the Internet using geometric coordinates, showing the nodes and connections that make up the Web topology and simplifying the current routing protocol to make it more efficient. The corresponding author of the article is Marián Boguñá, a lecturer with the Department of Fundamental Physics at the University of Barcelona.

Boguñá, M. et al. Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping. Nature Communications
Boguñá, M. et al. Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping. Nature Communications
08/09/2010

An article published in the online portal of the journal Nature Communications presents a method for mapping the Internet using geometric coordinates, showing the nodes and connections that make up the Web topology and simplifying the current routing protocol to make it more efficient. The corresponding author of the article is Marián Boguñá, a lecturer with the Department of Fundamental Physics at the University of Barcelona.

The map represents the autonomous systems - essentially individual networks owned mainly by large telecommunications companies - that make up the architecture of the Internet. There are currently around 24,000 of these systems linked by 60,000 connections in a highly complex self-organizing structure. 

“The map was created by modelling the Internet to a hyperbolic space, so that if two nodes are closely located in this space they are much more likely to be connected in the real Web”, says Marián Boguñá, who explains that, “If we compare the information on the countries to which the autonomous systems belong with their coordinates on the map we can see that there are several virtual communities which reflect the geopolitical situation in the world”.

Experts estimate that if the current rate of growth is maintained - 2,400 new autonomous systems are created each year - the information transfer protocol used by the Internet will become obsolete within the next ten years. At the moment, to transfer information between two computers located in different autonomous systems, all autonomous systems must have access to global information on the routes to all possible destinations across the entire topology.

Since the Internet is a dynamic network, every time a change occurs the system must recompute the routes affected by this change, and the time required for this process will increase as the Web expands. “With the map we have designed, to determine the best route it is only necessary to know the coordinates of the neighbouring systems and to determine which of these minimizes the distance to the required destination”, explains Boguñá, who believes that the mapping system presented in the article is a viable alternative to the current protocol.

Article:
Marián Boguñá, Fragkiskos Papadopoulos and Dmitri Krioukov. «Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping». Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1063 (2010).