This is how the Internet looks, according to physicists at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. The map was obtained from mathematical representations of the routes between each autonomous systems in the world. The purple points represent the periphery of the Internet, which means the smaller ISPs, and the red points represent the international carriers like Akamai or AT&T, which have massive networks. Packets from smaller ISPs need to travel to the center of map, creating a congestion point, so in order to optimize your network, you’ll need to ‘move’ it closer to the center, reducing the latency and increasing the center size, adding more capacity to it. You can read the paper if you’re up to some ‘k-shell decomposition’, the method used to map the Internet. There are other maps of this kind, one of which still impresses me:

This one was created by the Internet Mapping Project , consists of frequent traceroute-style path probes, one to each registered Internet entity. From this, they build a graph (with approximately 140 000+ nodes!) showing the paths to most of the nets on the Internet. You can view the full graph view here. For more curiosity, there’s also an interesting IP address map. For more maps, head over CyberGeography, a site dedicated to Internet mappings.

You can also help creating a map! The DIMES Project allows you to contribute information, such as traceroutes and pings.

Pointers:

Paper: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat_files/topology_PNAS.pdf

Internet Mapping Project: http://www.cheswick.com/ches/map/index.html

The Dimes Project: http://www.netdimes.org/new/

CyberGeography: http://www.cybergeography.org 

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