EVOLUTION AND STRUCTURE OF THE INTERNET
A Statistical Physics Approach
This book describes the application of statistical physics and complex systems
theory to the study of the evolution and structure of the Internet.
Using a statistical physics approach, the Internet is viewed as a growing system
that evolves in time through the addition and removal of nodes and links. This per-
spective permits us to outline the dynamical theory required for a description of the
macroscopic evolution of the Internet. The presence of such a theoretical frame-
work appears to be a revolutionary and promising path towards our understanding
of the Internet and the various processes taking place on this network, including,
for example, the spread of computer viruses or resilience to random or intentional
damages.
The presentation focuses on statistical regularities observed in the large-scale
structure of the network, the so-called “global Internet” as well as on the impor-
tance of dynamics in the formulation of adequate models. Using this approach it is
possible to provide a unified picture of results obtained on the Internet in the con-
text of different scientific communities. This makes use of methods and concepts
that have proven to be extremely useful in the analysis of more classical statisti-
cal physics systems, such as percolation theory, mean-field methods, and cellular
automata simulations.
This book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in statistical
physics, computer science, and mathematics studying the structure and evolution
of the internet.
ROMUALDO PASTOR-SATORRAS received his Ph.D. at
the University of
Barcelona. He has been a research fellow at Yale University and at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. He spent two years
as a research fellow at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (UNESCO)
and then moved back to Spain in 2000 as Assistant Professor at the University of
Barcelona. Since 2001, Pastor-Satorras has been a research scientist and lecturer at
the