The Rich Get Richer Process: Internet Routers
The rich get richer process is essentially the process in which nodes’ ability to gain connections is proportional to how many connections the respective nodes already have themselves. Essentially what this means is that there will be an increasing gap between two nodes with different amount of initial connections. This power law distribution can be seen with real and tangible data more commonly with large events as than with smaller events. Clearly, this is applicable in real life to people in regards to wealth. However, instead of looking at the power law distribution of wealth, this UC Davis article asks the question if we can apply this rich get richer process to the world of Internet routers.
The researchers, namely Raissa D’Souza and colleagues at Microsoft Research, UCLA, and Cornell University looked at how this preferential attachment can arise in Internet networks. What the researchers found is that they were able to make certain tradeoffs between the network distance between nodes and the number of connections between them. These were the conditions in which if the researchers tweaked, they were able to make the power law effect (rich get richer effect) either stronger or weaker. This experiment demonstrates the same general principles as the rich get richer effect on people’s wealth. As long as an Internet router has a large number of connections between it and another Internet router, it would continue to grow stronger and stronger. This phenomenon is especially exciting in this field because it shows a logical explanation for something that was initially believed to be unquestionable.
source: https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/why-rich-get-richer-wealth-connections/