Socio-technologic systems

In the age of Information Technology, the Internet has become our primary communication system. It is estimated that more than a billion users surf every day the web looking for information, sharing files, or developing new applications. The physical Internet is like a new world where all kind of new social and technological structures are constantly emerging. The Internet has thus become a common good, such as roads, railways, or airline connections and, as such, should be considered. The most surprising fact about the Internet is that, despite some preconceived ideas, its complex architecture is the result of a self-organized process where individual agents (Internet Service Providers or ISPs) interact locally without any central authority controlling its evolution. This turns the Internet into subject of truly scientific research.

Our main motivation for studying the Internet comes from long-standing scalability problems with the Internet routing architecture. To route information packets to a given destination, Internet routers must communicate to maintain a coherent view of the global Internet topology. The constantly increasing size and dynamics of the Internet thus leads to immense and quickly growing communication and information processing overhead, a major bottleneck in routing scalability causing concerns among Internet experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade. In our research, we assume that the Internet (and other complex networks) lives in a hidden metric space that shapes its topology. Discovery of this hidden metric space can then be used to greedily route information without detailed global knowledge of the network structure or organization.