Generating network topologies that obey power laws

TLDR

Internet graphs and other network systems are known to follow power‑law distributions. The study investigates whether artificial network topologies used in simulations obey power‑law laws and whether this matters, presenting two new generators that do. The authors develop two new topology generators that satisfy power‑law properties and re‑evaluate a multicast study to demonstrate the impact of using such topologies.

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that Internet graphs and other network systems follow power-laws. Are these laws obeyed by the artificial network topologies used in network simulations? Does it matter? In this paper we show that current topology generators do not obey all of the power-laws, and we present two new topology generators that do. We also re-evaluate a multicast study to show the impact of using power-law topologies.