Power Laws

An interesting work that demonstrates the 1998-era internet can be described concisely by some power law relationships. The particulars of the relationships are not that important.

I totally buy the argument, as it's clear that there's a generic topology that should be consistent throughout the network. As the paper was written for the 1998 internet, it's likely that the boom of the late 90s to early 00s was not anticipated. I'd like to see a reassessment of this work for the modern internet. I should mention that they explicitly said that their assumptions do not account for the boom and bust properties of technology.

I do question the usefulness of this work. I see the value in being able to build reasonable approximations of the internet. However, this sort of mechanism only applies in areas where it's impossible to directly measure the network. Sensornets, datacenters, and the like are small enough (and generally have design documents) that we don't need to approximate anything. Perhaps it would still be valuable to model these other networks as university researchers may not have access to the designs of the other networks.

I like the design of the work. It's very systems to build something and then figure out the theoretical grounds for it, rather than the other way around. These heuristic works make sure that the theoretical backings are of use.