An accessible illustrated introducton to the networks we use every day, from Facebook and Google to WiFi and the Internet What makes WiFi faster at home than at a coffee shop? How does Google order search results? Is it really true that everyone on Facebook is connected by six steps or less? The Power of Networks answers questions like these for the first time in a way that all of us can understand. Using simple language, analogies, stories, hundreds of illustrations, and no more math than simple addition and multiplication, Christopher Brinton and Mung Chiang provide a smart and accessible introduction to the handful of big ideas that drive the computer networks we use every day. The Power of Networks unifies these ideas through six fundamental principles of networking. These principles explain the difficulties in sharing network resources efficiently, how crowds can be wise or not so wise depending on the nature of their connections, why there are many layers in a network, and more. Along the way, the authors also talk with and share the special insights of renowned experts such as Google’s Eric Schmidt, former Verizon Wireless CEO Dennis Strigl, and “fathers of the Internet” Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

This book describes the transformation of telecommunications from national network monopolies to a new system, the "network of networks," and the glue that holds it together, interconnection. By their very nature, monopoly-owned networks provided a small number of standardized, nationwide services. Over the past two decades, however, new forces in the world economy began to unravel this traditional system. The driving force behind the change was the shift toward an information-based economy. Especially for large organizations, the price, control, security, and reliability of telecommunications became variables requiring organized attention. Thus, monopoly began to give way to the "network of networks," the foundation of today's telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. Taking a broad, multidisciplinary perspective Eli Noam discusses the importance and history of interconnection policy, as well as recent policy reforms both within the United States and around the globe. Other important topics he discusses include interconnection prices, the unbundling of interconnection, and the technology of interconnection. He concludes with an examination of social and policy issues, including the free flow of content, universal service and privacy protection, and the future of telecommunications.

Today, interest in networks is growing by leaps and bounds, in both scientific discourse and popular culture. Networks are thought to be everywhere – from the architecture of our brains to global transportation systems. And networks are especially ubiquitous in the social world: they provide us with social support, account for the emergence of new trends and markets, and foster social protest, among other functions. Besides, who among us is not familiar with Facebook, Twitter, or, for that matter, World of Warcraft, among the myriad emerging forms of network-based virtual social interaction? It is common to think of networks simply in structural terms – the architecture of connections among objects, or the circuitry of a system. But social networks in particular are thoroughly interwoven with cultural things, in the form of tastes, norms, cultural products, styles of communication, and much more. What exactly flows through the circuitry of social networks? How are people's identities and cultural practices shaped by network structures? And, conversely, how do people's identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the network structures they create? This book is designed to help readers think about how and when culture and social networks systematically penetrate one another, helping to shape each other in significant ways.

This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. The social and environmental challenges we face today are not only complex, they are also systemic and structural and have no obvious solutions. They require diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear. Even so, collaborative efforts often fail because they attempt to navigate complexity with traditional strategic plans, created by hierarchies that ignore the way people naturally connect. By embracing a living-systems approach to organizing, impact networks bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of the group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions. As a powerful and flexible organizing system that can span regions, organizations, and silos of all kinds, impact networks underlie some of the most impressive and large-scale efforts to create change across the globe. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks. Given the increasing complexity of our society and the issues we face, our ability to form, grow, and work through networks has never been more essential.

Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, Fifth Edition, explores the key principles of computer networking, with examples drawn from the real world of network and protocol design. Using the Internet as the primary example, this best-selling and classic textbook explains various protocols and networking technologies. The systems-oriented approach encourages students to think about how individual network components fit into a larger, complex system of interactions. This book has a completely updated content with expanded coverage of the topics of utmost importance to networking professionals and students, including P2P, wireless, network security, and network applications such as e-mail and the Web, IP telephony and video streaming, and peer-to-peer file sharing. There is now increased focus on application layer issues where innovative and exciting research and design is currently the center of attention. Other topics include network design and architecture; the ways users can connect to a network; the concepts of switching, routing, and internetworking; end-to-end protocols; congestion control and resource allocation; and end-to-end data. Each chapter includes a problem statement, which introduces issues to be examined; shaded sidebars that elaborate on a topic or introduce a related advanced topic; What's Next? discussions that deal with emerging issues in research, the commercial world, or society; and exercises. This book is written for graduate or upper-division undergraduate classes in computer networking. It will also be useful for industry professionals retraining for network-related assignments, as well as for network practitioners seeking to understand the workings of network protocols and the big picture of networking. - Completely updated content with expanded coverage of the topics of utmost importance to networking professionals and students, including P2P, wireless, security, and applications - Increased focus on application layer issues where innovative and exciting research and design is currently the center of attention - Free downloadable network simulation software and lab experiments manual available

Are all film stars linked to Kevin Bacon? Why do the stock markets rise and fall sharply on the strength of a vague rumour? How does gossip spread so quickly? Are we all related through six degrees of separation? There is a growing awareness of the complex networks that pervade modern society. We see them in the rapid growth of the internet, the ease of global communication, the swift spread of news and information, and in the way epidemics and financial crises develop with startling speed and intensity. This introductory book on the new science of networks takes an interdisciplinary approach, using economics, sociology, computing, information science and applied mathematics to address fundamental questions about the links that connect us, and the ways that our decisions can have consequences for others.

A guide to creating a home computer network covers such topics as implementing network addressing, configuring network adapters and routers, sharing music and photos, automating household appliances, and troubleshooting.

The scientific study of networks, including computer networks, social networks, and biological networks, has received an enormous amount of interest in the last few years. The rise of the Internet and the wide availability of inexpensive computers have made it possible to gather and analyze network data on a large scale, and the development of a variety of new theoretical tools has allowed us to extract new knowledge from many different kinds of networks. The study of networks is broadly interdisciplinary and important developments have occurred in many fields, including mathematics, physics, computer and information sciences, biology, and the social sciences. This book brings together for the first time the most important breakthroughs in each of these fields and presents them in a coherent fashion, highlighting the strong interconnections between work in different areas. Subjects covered include the measurement and structure of networks in many branches of science, methods for analyzing network data, including methods developed in physics, statistics, and sociology, the fundamentals of graph theory, computer algorithms, and spectral methods, mathematical models of networks, including random graph models and generative models, and theories of dynamical processes taking place on networks.

A comprehensive overview of networks and economic design, presenting models and results drawn from economics, operations research, and computer science; with examples and exercises. This book explores networks and economic design, focusing on the role played by allocation rules (revenue and cost-sharing schemes) in creating and sustaining efficient network solutions. It takes a normative approach, seeking economically efficient network solutions sustained by distributional fairness, and considers how different ways of allocating liability affect incentives for network usage and development. The text presents an up-to-date overview of models and results currently scattered over several strands of literature, drawing on economics, operations research, and computer science. The book's analysis of allocation problems includes such classic models from combinatorial optimization as the minimum cost spanning tree and the traveling salesman problem. It examines the planner's ability to design mechanisms that will implement efficient network structures, both in large decentralized networks and when there is user-agent information asymmetry. Offering systematic theoretical analyses of various compelling allocation rules in cases of fixed network structures as well as discussions of network design problems, the book covers such topics as tree-structured distribution systems, routing games, organizational hierarchies, the “price of anarchy,” mechanism design, and efficient implementation. Appropriate as a reference for practitioners in network regulation and the network industry or as a text for graduate students, the book offers numerous illustrative examples and end-of-chapter exercises that highlight the concepts and methods presented.

Order from chaos is simultaneously a mantra of physics and a reality in biology. Physicist Norman Packard suggested that life developed and thrives at the edge of chaos. Questions remain, however, as to how much practical knowledge of biology can be traced to existing physical principles, and how much physics has to change in order to address the complexity of biology. Phil Anderson, a physics Nobel laureate, contributed to popularizing a new notion of the end of "reductionism." In this view, it is necessary to abandon the quest of reducing complex behavior to known physical results, and to identify emergent behaviors and principles. In the present book, however, we have sought physical rules that can underlie the behavior of biota as well as the geochemistry of soil development. We looked for fundamental principles, such as the dominance of water flow paths with the least cumulative resistance, that could maintain their relevance across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, together with the appropriate description of solute transport associated with such flow paths. Thus, ultimately, we address both nutrient and water transport limitations of processes from chemical weathering to vascular plant growth. The physical principles guiding our effort are established in different, but related concepts and fields of research, so that in fact our book applies reductionist techniques guided by analogy. The fact that fundamental traits extend across biotic and abiotic processes, i.e., the same fluid flow rate is relevant to both, but that distinctions in topology of the connected paths lead to dramatic differences in growth rates, helps unite the study of these nominally different disciplines of geochemistry and geobiology within the same framework. It has been our goal in writing this book to share the excitement of learning, and one of the most exciting portions to us has been the ability to bring some order to the question of the extent to which soils can facilitate plant growth, and what limitations on plant sizes, metabolism, occurrence, and correlations can be formulated thereby. While we bring order to the soil constraints on growth, we also generate some uncertainties in the scaling relationships of plant growth and metabolism. Although we have made an first attempt to incorporate edaphic constraints into allometric scaling, this is but an initial foray into the forest.