"The internet as jellyfish"

I think this is an interesting visual analogy - jellyfish as the model of a complex system. Of course - jellyfish are fairly simple as far as life structures go - so it just goes to show you where people are at in the scheme of things. IOW - our complex systems are relatively basic.

Monster jellyfish? Mapping the global internet

By developing novel methods to map and model the internet, even visualising it as a jellyfish, the EVERGROW project is challenging conventional thinking and offering new insights into how best to route future network traffic...

The team clusters the shells outside the nucleus into two groups, according to their connectivity – one group being highly interconnected, and a second group consisting of isolated clusters which connect directly to the nucleus.

“We tend to draw pictures of it as a jellyfish,” enthuses Scott Kirkpatrick, EVERGROW scientific coordinator. “The largest, well-connected part is the outer mantle of the jellyfish, the little nucleus is the brain, and the tendrils hanging down are the least connected features that have to send their messages to the nucleus before being fed out.”

This novel analysis shows the nucleus of the internet as containing about 100 nodes, the highly connected mantle with about 15 thousand nodes, and the simple tendrils with the remaining five thousand.

“When we look at the composition of the nucleus, we find that it is international. There is about a one third, one third, one third distribution, between the European, North American and Far Eastern contributors,” notes Kirkpatrick....

Finally, Kirkpatrick stresses that this analytical method can be applied equally well to networks in other complex systems, such as cellular communications networks, power grids and national economies. “The numbers are different, but the three groups – the tendrils, the mantle and the nucleus of the jellyfish – all occur and seem to have the same roles.”