| Despite the apparent randomness of the Internet, we discover
some surprisingly simple power-laws of the Internet
topology. These power-laws hold for three snapshots of the
Internet, between November 1997 and December 1998, despite
a 45% growth of its size during that period. We show
that our power-laws fit the real data very well resulting in
correlation coefficients of 96% or higher.
Our observations provide a novel perspective of the structure
of the Internet. The power-laws describe concisely
skewed distributions of graph properties such as the node
outdegree. In addition, these power-laws can be used to
estimate important parameters such as the average neighborhood
size, and facilitate the design and the performance
analysis of protocols. Furthermore, we can use them to generate
and select realistic topologies for simulation purposes.
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