A structural approach to the temporal modeling of networks

Simulation of many dynamic real world systems such as the Internet and social networks requires developing dynamic models for the underlying networks in these systems. Currently, there is a large body of work devoted towards determining the underlying mechanisms that create these networks, but the resulting models have not realistically captured many of the important structural characteristics when compared with real world examples. Towards creating more realistic dynamic models, we propose a method of structurally constructing models of an evolving network. We then conduct a series of computational experiments in modeling the evolution of the autonomous system (AS) topology of the Internet to test the effectiveness of our approach.