Local assortativity and growth of Internet

Abstract

Local assortativity has been recently proposed as a measure to analyse complex networks. It has been noted that the Internet Autonomous System level networks show a markedly different local assortativity profile to most biological and social networks. In this paper we show that, even though several Internet growth models exist, none of them produce the local assortativity profile that can be observed in the real AS networks. We introduce a new generic growth model which can produce a linear local assortativity profile similar to that of the Internet. We verify that this model accurately depicts the local assortativity profile criteria of Internet, while also satisfactorily modelling other attributes of AS networks already explained by existing models.