Dmitri Krioukov
07 juillet 2010
We establish a connection between the scale-free topology of complex networks, and the hyperbolic geometry of hidden metric spaces underlying these networks. Given a hyperbolic space, networks topologies with scale-free degree distributions and strong clustering naturally emerge on top of the space as topological reflections of its hyperbolic geometry. Conversely, for any scale-free network with strong clustering, there is an effective hyperbolic space underlying the network. The underlying hyperbolic geometry enables greedy routing with optimal efficiency. Greedy routing does not require any global information about network topology to navigate the network. At each hop, greedy routing selects as the next hop the current hop neighbor closest to the destination in the underlying hyperbolic space. We show that in complex networks mapped to their hyperbolic spaces, greedy routing always succeeds reaching the destination, following the topologically shortest paths. Furthermore, we show that even without re-mapping the network or changing any node coordinates, this navigation efficiency is remarkably robust with respect to rapid network dynamics, and catastrophic levels of network damage. We map the real Internet AS-level topology to its hyperbolic space, and find that greedy routing using this map exhibits similar efficiency. These results effectively deliver a solution for Internet interdomain routing with theoretically best possible scaling properties. Not only routing table sizes and stretch are as small as possible, but also routing communication overhead is reduced to zero.