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Heuristically Optimized Trade-Offs: A New Paradigm for Power Laws in the Internet

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Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2002)

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Abstract

We propose a plausible explanation of the power law distributions of degrees observed in the graphs arising in the Internet topology [Faloutsos, Faloutsos, and Faloutsos, SIGCOMM 1999] based on a toy model of Internet growth in which two objectives are optimized simultaneously: “last mile” connection costs, and transmission delays measured in hops. We also point out a similar phenomenon, anticipated in [Carlson and Doyle, Physics Review E 1999], in the distribution of file sizes. Our results seem to suggest that power laws tend to arise as a result of complex, multi-objective optimization.

Research supported in part by NSF and the IST Program.

Research supported in part by an NSF ITR grant, and an IBM faculty development award.

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Fabrikant, A., Koutsoupias, E., Papadimitriou, C.H. (2002). Heuristically Optimized Trade-Offs: A New Paradigm for Power Laws in the Internet. In: Widmayer, P., Eidenbenz, S., Triguero, F., Morales, R., Conejo, R., Hennessy, M. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2380. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45465-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45465-9_11

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43864-9

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