The impact of socio-economic factors on the city-level China Internet structure

Understanding the driving forces behind the Internet evolution is critical, which can provide benefits to construct more realistic Internet models with more comprehensive Internet simulations. In most of the Internet modeling mechanisms proposed so far, e.g. the preferential attachment rule, some basic structural properties such as the node and edge connectivities play the key roles in forming the network structure. Very few works to date have explored the effects of socio-economic factors on the formation and evolution of the Internet structure. In this paper, the China Internet structure is investigated, on the city level, showing that the constructed network is a highly heterogeneous network with small-world features. Then, the effect and impact of socioeconomic factors on the city-level China Internet structure is explored, including population, population growth rate, gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP per Capita. It is shown that population, population growth rate and GDP per Capita are weakly correlated to the connectivity of cities. Strikingly, GDP of a city is highly related to its connectivity in the network. The higher the GDP of a city, the higher the probability to attract connections from other cities. The new findings reveal that GDP is a good indicator for the scaling of the Internet at the city level.