On power-law relationships of the Internet topology
Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication
The web as a graph: measurements, models, and methods
COCOON'99 Proceedings of the 5th annual international conference on Computing and combinatorics
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Although the Internet is manmade, its exact structure is a mystery. Most of its component networks are owned and managed by private companies that keep their hardware specifications secret for commercial and security reasons. In this respect, the Internet--routers and the network hops between them--has much in common with other real-world networks, such as the World Wide Web. They, too, have formed organically, and their topologies and growth patterns remain elusive. In the late 1990s, several groups of researchers published studies suggesting that the graphs of many such real-world networks are "heavy-tailed"--meaning they have an unexpectedly large number of high-degree nodes. Following these studies, physicists at the University of Notre Dame, led by Albert-Laszlo Barabási, published two highly influential papers describing a growth mechanism that might explain this phenomenon as well as a key feature of networks generated by it: an Achilles heel.