arXiv subjects

Matthieu Latapy

Publications and source records attributed to Matthieu Latapy.

52 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2009

Impact of Random Failures and Attacks on Poisson and Power-Law Random Networks

It appeared recently that the underlying degree distribution of networks may play a crucial role concerning their robustness. Empiric and analytic results have been obtained, based on asymptotic and mean-field approximations. Previous work insisted on the fact that power-law degree distributions induce high resilience to random failure but high sensitivity to attack strategies, while Poisson degree distributions are quite sensitive in both cases. Then, much work has been done to extend these results. We aim here at studying in depth these results, their origin, and limitations. We review in detail previous contributions and give full proofs in a unified framework, and identify the approximations on which these results rely. We then present new results aimed at enlightening some important aspects. We also provide extensive rigorous experiments which help evaluate the relevance of the analytic results. We reach the conclusion that, even if the basic results of the field are clearly true and important, they are in practice much less striking than generally thought. The differences between random failures and attacks are not so huge and can be explained with simple facts. Likewise, the differences in the behaviors induced by power-law and Poisson distributions are not as striking as often claimed.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2009

Measurement of eDonkey Activity with Distributed Honeypots

Collecting information about user activity in peer-to-peer systems is a key but challenging task. We describe here a distributed platform for doing so on the eDonkey network, relying on a group of honeypot peers which claim to have certain files and log queries they receive for these files. We then conduct some measurements with typical scenarios and use the obtained data to analyze the impact of key parameters like measurement duration, number of honeypots involved, and number of advertised files. This illustrates both the possible uses of our measurement system, and the kind of data one may collect using it.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2009

Efficient Measurement of Complex Networks Using Link Queries

Complex networks are at the core of an intense research activity. However, in most cases, intricate and costly measurement procedures are needed to explore their structure. In some cases, these measurements rely on link queries: given two nodes, it is possible to test the existence of a link between them. These tests may be costly, and thus minimizing their number while maximizing the number of discovered links is a key issue. This paper studies this problem: we observe that properties classically observed on real-world complex networks give hints for their efficient measurement; we derive simple principles and several measurement strategies based on this, and experimentally evaluate their efficiency on real-world cases. In order to do so, we introduce methods to evaluate the efficiency of strategies. We also explore the bias that different measurement strategies may induce.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2009

Fast dynamics in Internet topology: preliminary observations and explanations

By focusing on what can be observed by running traceroute-like measurements at a high frequency from a single monitor to a fixed destination set, we show that the observed view of the topology is constantly evolving at a pace much higher than expected. Repeated measurements discover new IP addresses at a constant rate, for long period of times (up to several months). In order to provide explanations, we study this phenomenon both at the IP, and at the Autonomous System levels. We show that this renewal of IP addresses is partially caused by a BGP routing dynamics, altering paths between existing ASes. Furthermore, we conjecture that an intra AS routing dynamics is another cause of this phenomenon.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2009

Fast Computation of Empirically Tight Bounds for the Diameter of Massive Graphs

The diameter of a graph is among its most basic parameters. Since a few years, it moreover became a key issue to compute it for massive graphs in the context of complex network analysis. However, known algorithms, including the ones producing approximate values, have too high a time and/or space complexity to be used in such cases. We propose here a new approach relying on very simple and fast algorithms that compute (upper and lower) bounds for the diameter. We show empirically that, on various real-world cases representative of complex networks studied in the literature, the obtained bounds are very tight (and even equal in some cases). This leads to rigorous and very accurate estimations of the actual diameter in cases which were previously untractable in practice.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2009

Detection, Understanding, and Prevention of Traceroute Measurement Artifacts

Traceroute is widely used: from the diagnosis of network problems to the assemblage of internet maps. Unfortu- nately, there are a number of problems with traceroute methodology, which lead to the inference of erroneous routes. This paper studies particular structures arising in nearly all traceroute measurements. We characterize them as "loops", "cycles", and "diamonds". We iden- tify load balancing as a possible cause for the appear- ance of false loops, cycles and diamonds, i.e., artifacts that do not represent the internet topology. We pro- vide a new publicly-available traceroute, called Paris traceroute, which, by controlling the packet header con- tents, provides a truer picture of the actual routes that packets follow. We performed measurements, from the perspective of a single source tracing towards multiple destinations, and Paris traceroute allowed us to show that many of the particular structures we observe are indeed traceroute measurement artifacts.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2009

A Radar for the Internet

In contrast with most internet topology measurement research, our concern here is not to obtain a map as complete and precise as possible of the whole internet. Instead, we claim that each machine's view of this topology, which we call ego-centered view, is an object worth of study in itself. We design and implement an ego-centered measurement tool, and perform radar-like measurements consisting of repeated measurements of such views of the internet topology. We conduct long-term (several weeks) and high-speed (one round every few minutes) measurements of this kind from more than one hundred monitors, and we provide the obtained data. We also show that these data may be used to detect events in the dynamics of internet topology.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2008

Ten weeks in the life of an eDonkey server

This paper presents a capture of the queries managed by an eDonkey server during almost 10 weeks, leading to the observation of almost 9 billion messages involving almost 90 million users and more than 275 million distinct files. Acquisition and management of such data raises several challenges, which we discuss as well as the solutions we developed. We obtain a very rich dataset, orders of magnitude larger than previously avalaible ones, which we provide for public use. We finally present basic analysis of the obtained data, which already gives evidence of non-trivial features.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2007

Measuring Fundamental Properties of Real-World Complex Networks

Complex networks, modeled as large graphs, received much attention during these last years. However, data on such networks is only available through intricate measurement procedures. Until recently, most studies assumed that these procedures eventually lead to samples large enough to be representative of the whole, at least concerning some key properties. This has crucial impact on network modeling and simulation, which rely on these properties. Recent contributions proved that this approach may be misleading, but no solution has been proposed. We provide here the first practical way to distinguish between cases where it is indeed misleading, and cases where the observed properties may be trusted. It consists in studying how the properties of interest evolve when the sample grows, and in particular whether they reach a steady state or not. In order to illustrate this method and to demonstrate its relevance, we apply it to data-sets on complex network measurements that are representative of the ones commonly used. The obtained results show that the method fulfills its goals very well. We moreover identify some properties which seem easier to evaluate in practice, thus opening interesting perspectives.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2006

Basic Notions for the Analysis of Large Affiliation Networks / Bipartite Graphs

Many real-world complex networks actually have a bipartite nature: their nodes may be separated into two classes, the links being between nodes of different classes only. Despite this, and despite the fact that many ad-hoc tools have been designed for the study of special cases, very few exist to analyse (describe, extract relevant information) such networks in a systematic way. We propose here an extension of the most basic notions used nowadays to analyse classical complex networks to the bipartite case. To achieve this, we introduce a set of simple statistics, which we discuss by comparing their values on a representative set of real-world networks and on their random versions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2006

Theory and Practice of Triangle Problems in Very Large (Sparse (Power-Law)) Graphs

Finding, counting and/or listing triangles (three vertices with three edges) in large graphs are natural fundamental problems, which received recently much attention because of their importance in complex network analysis. We provide here a detailed state of the art on these problems, in a unified way. We note that, until now, authors paid surprisingly little attention to space complexity, despite its both fundamental and practical interest. We give the space complexities of known algorithms and discuss their implications. Then we propose improvements of a known algorithm, as well as a new algorithm, which are time optimal for triangle listing and beats previous algorithms concerning space complexity. They have the additional advantage of performing better on power-law graphs, which we also study. We finally show with an experimental study that these two algorithms perform very well in practice, allowing to handle cases that were previously out of reach.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2005

Computing communities in large networks using random walks (long version)

Dense subgraphs of sparse graphs (communities), which appear in most real-world complex networks, play an important role in many contexts. Computing them however is generally expensive. We propose here a measure of similarities between vertices based on random walks which has several important advantages: it captures well the community structure in a network, it can be computed efficiently, and it can be used in an agglomerative algorithm to compute efficiently the community structure of a network. We propose such an algorithm, called Walktrap, which runs in time O(mn^2) and space O(n^2) in the worst case, and in time O(n^2log n) and space O(n^2) in most real-world cases (n and m are respectively the number of vertices and edges in the input graph). Extensive comparison tests show that our algorithm surpasses previously proposed ones concerning the quality of the obtained community structures and that it stands among the best ones concerning the running time.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2005

Fast generation of random connected graphs with prescribed degrees

We address here the problem of generating random graphs uniformly from the set of simple connected graphs having a prescribed degree sequence. Our goal is to provide an algorithm designed for practical use both because of its ability to generate very large graphs (efficiency) and because it is easy to implement (simplicity). We focus on a family of heuristics for which we prove optimality conditions, and show how this optimality can be reached in practice. We then propose a different approach, specifically designed for typical real-world degree distributions, which outperforms the first one. Assuming a conjecture which we state and argue rigorously, we finally obtain an log-linear algorithm, which, in spite of being very simple, improves the best known complexity.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2004

Computing communities in large networks using random walks

Dense subgraphs of sparse graphs (communities), which appear in most real-world complex networks, play an important role in many contexts. Computing them however is generally expensive. We propose here a measure of similarities between vertices based on random walks which has several important advantages: it captures well the community structure in a network, it can be computed efficiently, it works at various scales, and it can be used in an agglomerative algorithm to compute efficiently the community structure of a network. We propose such an algorithm which runs in time O(mn^2) and space O(n^2) in the worst case, and in time O(n^2log n) and space O(n^2) in most real-world cases (n and m are respectively the number of vertices and edges in the input graph). Experimental evaluation shows that our algorithm surpasses previously proposed ones concerning the quality of the obtained community structures and that it stands among the best ones concerning the running time. This is very promising because our algorithm can be improved in several ways, which we sketch at the end of the paper.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2004

Describing and Simulating Internet Routes

This paper introduces relevant statistics for the description of routes in the internet, seen as a graph at the interface level. Based on the observed properties, we propose and evaluate methods for generating artificial routes suitable for simulation purposes. The work in this paper is based upon a study of over seven million route traces produced by CAIDA's skitter infrastructure.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2001

Coding Distributive Lattices with Edge Firing Games

In this note, we show that any distributive lattice is isomorphic to the set of reachable configurations of an Edge Firing Game. Together with the result of James Propp, saying that the set of reachable configurations of any Edge Firing Game is always a distributive lattice, this shows that the two concepts are equivalent.

math.CO↗