Structural Modeling and Characteristics Analysis of Flow Interaction Networks in the Internet

Applying network duality and elastic mechanics, we investigate the interactions among Internet flows by constructing a weighted undirected network, where the vertices and the edges represent the flows and the mutual dependence between flows, respectively. Based on the obtained flow interaction network, we find the existence of 'super flow' in the Internet, indicating that some flows have a great impact on a huge number of other flows; moreover, one flow can spread its influence to another through a limited quantity of flows (less than 5 in the experimental simulations), which shows strong small-world characteristics like the social network. To reflect the flow interactions in the physical network congestion evaluation, the 'congestion coefficient' is proposed as a new metric which shows a finer observation on congestion than the conventional one.