A Detailed Study of the Attachment Strategies of New Autonomous Systems in the AS Connectivity Graph

Abstract

The connectivity of the autonomous systems (ASs) in the Internet can be modeled as a time-evolving random graph, whose nodes represent ASs (or routers), and whose edges represent direct connections between them. Even though this graph has some random aspects, its properties show it to be fundamentally different from "traditional'' random graphs. In the first part of this paper, we use real BGP data to study some properties of the AS connectivity graph and its evolution in time. In the second part, we build a simple model that is inspired by observations made in the first part, and we discuss simulations of this model.