Types of Networks…

from the network-fun dept

mhh5 writes “Apparently networks come in two flavors according to a Nature article: exponential and scale-free. Exponential networks are pretty homogeneous, so targeted attacks and random attacks have pretty much the same effect on the network. Scale-free networks (like the internet) contain a few highly connected nodes, so targeted attacks can be devastating whereas random attacks are often unnoticeable. This may all sound pretty obvious.. However, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t P2P and the WWW examples of both kinds of networks, respectively? If we combine the two, do we get a super-resistant communication network?”


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Comments on “Types of Networks…”

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2 Comments
Ryan (profile) says:

hmm... not necessarily

Using biological examples regardless of what type of networks you have they’ll always been weak points within a network of interconnected nodes. Sort of an analogy would be if I damaged a specific region in your brain (SNS region) with a tiny pin, you wouldn’t feel anything but all of a sudden your sleep and wake cycles would be messed up (until your body would just end up making you go to sleep and wake up at totally random times through the day and night). This process relies on only a small region of your brain but the functions that these regions preform can’t be duplicated anywhere else. Meaning = if you mess with certain sensitive nodes (in which ever configuration there in) on the internet (I guess some transatlantic nodes) you could really mess up the way the internet works for overseas users.

mhh5 says:

Re: hmm... not necessarily

Hmm. yeah, but I think if the two types of networks were interconnected in a certain way, you could make it “ultra-redundant” so that if you did, say stick a needle in my brain, there would be a few nodes that would be Peers that could serve to “route around the damage”… But I guess at some point you just start wasting resources.

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