<title>Hierarchical structure of the logical Internet graph</title>

Abstract

The study of the Internet topology has recently received much attention from the research community. In particular, the observation that the network graph has interesting properties, such as power laws, that might be explored in a myriad of ways. Most of the work in characterizing the Internet graph is based on the physical network graph, i.e., the connectivity graph. In this paper we investigate how logical relationships between nodes of the AS graph can be used to gain insight to its structure. We characterize the logical graph using various metrics and identify the presence of power laws in the number of customers that a provider has. Using these logical relationships we define a structural model of the AS graph. The model highlights the hierarchical nature of logical relationships and the preferential connection to larger providers. We also investigate the consistency of this model over time and observe interesting properties of the hierarchical structure.