A New Way of Looking at the Internet

As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But when you're talking about a picture of the Internet, it's worth a whole lot more (about 100 trillion words according to Google's director of research, Peter Norvig). Creating a complete map of the Internet is a goal that has remained largely elusive because of the ever-growing, highly complex nature of the Net. Now, through the efforts of researchers in Israel--from Bar-Ilan University, in Ramat Gan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Tel-Aviv University--the fuzzy image of the Internet has just gotten a bit clearer. The Israeli team recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in which they construct a new, more accurate picture of the Internet using a combination of graph-theory analysis and distributed computing.

A network like the Internet is composed of various nodes, or devices, such as computers, routers, PDAs, and so on, that are linked by one or more physical or virtual paths. To determine the structure of the Internet, researchers had to map out all these nodes and links and their relationships to one another. The main problem previous Internet cartographers faced was insufficient information. Data about network structure had been acquired through a limited number of observation points--computers using a software tool called traceroute to determine the path taken by data packets as they moved from source to destination through a network. The trouble was there were too few of these data points to generate a complete picture--a task comparable to a handful of people walking around and trying to map out the entire world.