Inferring and visualizing topological structures of largescale complex network

Abstract

Many information and communications networks are very large and they exhibit extremely complex structures. Here we propose a topology visualisation tool, called the bitmap of sorted adjacency matrix (BOSAM), which illustrates the connectivity information of a network as a bitmap image. We show that by using carefully designed rules to sort network node in specific orders, the produced bitmaps are able to reveal interesting patterns associated with the network structures. This simple tool can facilitate the study on characterising and modelling large-scale complex networks such as the Internet and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.