The rich-club phenomenon in the Internet topology

We show that the Internet topology at the autonomous system (AS) level has a rich-club phenomenon. The rich nodes, which are a small number of nodes with large numbers of links, are very well connected to each other. The rich-club is a core tier that we measured using the rich-club connectivity and the node-node link distribution. We obtained this core tier without any heuristic assumption between the ASs. The rich-club phenomenon is a simple qualitative way to differentiate between power law topologies and provides a criterion for new network models. To show this, we compared the measured rich-club of the AS graph with networks obtained using the Barabasi-Albert (BA) scale-free network model, the Fitness BA model and the Inet-3.0 model.