Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 6, numbers 1 and 2, 2013 // View article

Quantifying Network Heterogeneity by Using Mutual Information of the Remaining Degree Distribution

Authors:
Lu Chen
Shin'ichi Arakawa
Masayuki Murata

Keywords: power-law network; router-level topology; topological structure; mutual information; network heterogeneity; degree distribution; node failure.

Abstract:
As the Internet becomes a social infrastructure, a network design method that has adaptability against the failure of network equipment and has sustainability against changes of traffic demand is becoming important. Since we do not know in advance when the environmental changes occur and how large the changes are, it is preferable to have heterogeneity in topological structures so that the network can evolve more easily. In this paper, we investigate the heterogeneity of topological structures by using mutual information of remaining degree distribution. We discuss and show that the mutual information represents the heterogeneity of topological structure through illustrative examples. Our results show that the mutual information is high at most of router-level topologies, which indicate that the route-level topologies are highly designed by, e.g., the network operators. We also compared topologies with different mutual information, and show that, when node failures occur, the alternative paths will less converge on some of the links in topology having low mutual information.

Pages: 214 to 223

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x