Deciding on the type of the degree distribution of a graph from traceroute-like measurements
Résumé
The degree distribution of the Internet topology is considered as one of its main properties.
However, it is only known through a measurement procedure which gives a biased estimate. This
measurement may in first approximation be modeled by a BFS (Breadth-First Search) tree. We
explore here our ability to infer the type (Poisson or power-law) of the degree distribution from
such a limited knowledge. We design procedures which estimate the degree distribution of a graph
from a BFS of it, and show experimentally (on models and real-world data) that this approach
succeeds in making the difference between Poisson and power-law degree distributions.