People everywhere are generating ever-increasing amounts of data, often without being fully aware of who is recording what about them. For example, initiatives such as mandated smart metering, expected to be widely deployed in the UK in the next few years and already attempted in countries such as the Netherlands, will generate vast quantities of detailed, personal data about huge segments of the population. Neither the impact nor the potential of this society-wide data gathering are well understood.
Enterprise network architecture and management have followed the Internet’s design principles despite different requirements and characteristics: enterprise hosts are administered by a single authority, which intrinsically assigns different values to traffic from different business applications.
Despite the large number of papers on network topology modeling and inference, there still exists ambiguity about the real nature of the Internet AS and router level topology. While recent findings have illustrated the inaccuracies in maps inferred from BGP peering and traceroute measurements, existing topology models still produce static topologies, using simplistic assumptions about power law observations and preferential attachment.