A First-Principles Approach To Understanding the Internet's Router-level Topology

This paper presents a slightly different perspective on modeling the topology of the Internet. The authors initially point out flaws in the power-laws approach - essentially, several different network models can give rise to similar degree distributions, thereby reducing the effectiveness of power-laws. Instead, a "first-principles" approach with an emphasis on practical network engineering considerations is adopted here. One must identify which factors are fundamental to topology construction rather than simply searching for data-driven power-law analysis. In doing so, router technology and economic considerations must be taken into account.

Using probabilistic methods to generate graphs that model network behavior is a flawed approach as random rewiring between the nodes can damage the performance and efficiency of these models. Interestingly, the authors bring up the point that they have used "toy models" rather than actual network data to illustrate the new modeling approach. Even though they refute this criticism to a degree, there will remain some lack of credibility due to this facet of the research. Unlike the power-laws paper, this one appears to spend more time discussing the flaws of other approaches and not enough on concrete modeling techniques backed by network-based evaluation. Valid points are brought up but the paper feels a bit incomplete.