Abstract: A surge number of models has been proposed to model the Internet in the past decades. However, the issue on which models are better to model the Internet has still remained a problem. By analysing the evolving dynamics of the Internet, we suggest that at the autonomous system (AS) level, a suitable Internet model, should at least be heterogeneous and have a linearly growing mechanism. More importantly, we show that the roles of topological characteristics in evaluating and differentiating Internet models are apparently over-estimated from an engineering perspective. Also, we find that an assortative network is not necessarily more robust than a disassortative network and that a smaller average shortest path length does not necessarily mean a higher robustness, which is different from the previous observations. Our analytic results are helpful not only for the Internet, but also for other general complex networks.

Key words: AS-level Internet, scale-free model, robustness