Vital Signs of IPv4/IPv6 Macroscopic Internet Topologies

The Internet is considered under the comparative process of biological evolution, which can predict the future of the Internet. The IPv4 and IPv6 whole networks data from 2010 to 2014 authorized by CAIDA was adopted in this paper. On the basis of the previous researches, this study combines the Eigen’s definition of ‘vital signs’ with the Internet topology characters: the metabolism of the Internet is measured by the standard Internet structure entropy, and the process of the Internet self-replication is represented by the various degree distributions of K-core networks, and the errors happened in the process of Internet self-replication is characterized by the changes in the evolution of the average clustering coefficient and average path length. The vital signs are observed in both IPv4 and IPv6 Internet topologies, and IPv6 which has prominent vital signs behaves more vitality. The detection of the vital signs from Internet topology is a mark of introducing biological principles to researches on Internet topology successfully. For the further studies which are researched on or predict the dynamic of the Internet, the discovery in this study calls for attention to treat the Internet as a creature. It enriches the research methods and brings more space of development for the Internet researches. At the meantime, some advice for research direction about redesigning and rebuilding Internet is put forward in this study.