2005/10/04 by John C. Doyle, David Alderson, Lun Li +5 · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Computer Science · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #The Internet #Computer science #Data science #Robustness (evolution) #Focus (optics) #Complex network #Process (computing) #Fragility #World Wide Web #Biology
paper · doi:10.1073/pnas.0501426102
openalex publication_date 2005/10/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The search for unifying properties of complex networks is popular, challenging, and important. For modeling approaches that focus on robustness and fragility as unifying concepts, the Internet is an especially attractive case study, mainly because its applications are ubiquitous and pervasive, and widely available exposition exists at every level of detail. Nevertheless, alternative approaches to modeling the Internet often make extremely different assumptions and derive opposite conclusions about fundamental properties of one and the same system. Fortunately, a detailed understanding of Internet technology combined with a unique ability to measure the network means that these differences can be understood thoroughly and resolved unambiguously. This article aims to make recent results of this process accessible beyond Internet specialists to the broader scientific community and to clarify several sources of basic methodological differences that are relevant beyond either the Internet or the two specific approaches focused on here (i.e., scale-free networks and highly optimized tolerance networks).