A Strategic Approach for Re-organizing the Internet Topology by Applying Social Behavior Dynamics

Recent studies have described the topologies of various networks including the Internet are categorized as scale-free networks. Scale-free network is extremely vulnerable to node attacks. However, the suitability of the topology of the Internet for communications has not been studied. We investigate whether the current Internet is optimized in both aspects of communication efficiency and attack tolerance. For this, we define three metrics to represent the capabilities of the network, which are Clustering coefficient, Efficiency, and Reachability. As a result, we found that the value of γ, a scaling exponent in power law function representing the degree distribution of a scale-free network, may be reduced in the present Internet. To reduce the value of γ, we propose four strategies for re-organizing a network. However, in real network, we cannot control the user’s preference directly. We use a diffusion model based on social behavior dynamics. Furthermore, we show the characteristics of the re-organized networks, and discuss which strategy is more appropriate for achieving a desired network.