Evolution of the Internet at the Autonomous Systems Level During a Decade
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We empirically study the evolution of the Internet at the Autonomous Systems (ASes) level examining how many properties of its undirected graph change during the decade 2008-2017. In order to analyze local as well as global properties we consider three classes of metrics related to structure, connectivity and centrality. We find that the Internet almost doubled its size preserving the sparse nature and becoming more connected. The Internet has a small internal nucleus, composed of high degree ASes, much more stable and connected than external components. There are indications of an underlying hierarchical organization where a small fraction of big ASes are connected to many regions with high internal cohesiveness containing low and medium degree ASes and these regions are poorly connected among them. The overall trend of the average shortest path length of the Internet is a slight decrease over time. Betweenness centrality measurements suggest that during its evolution the Internet became less congested.
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