By Katie Greene
The Internet may be everywhere and nowhere, but that’s not stopping information engineers from mapping it. An atlas that accurately shows the physical path of information from one computer to another could protect the Internet from massive failures after, say, an earthquake or a terrorist attack. The latest finding by Internet cartographers offers some good news: Routing computers—the hardware that directs bits of information around the world—are linked in a way that makes the Internet less susceptible to a centralized attack than past studies had indicated.
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In an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, John Doyle of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues offer a new mathematical model of the Internet. The team used a class of models known as HOT, for highly optimized tolerance.