Formation Games of Reliable Networks

We establish a network formation game for the Internet's Autonomous System (AS) interconnection topology. The game includes different types of players, accounting for the heterogeneity of ASs in the Internet. We incorporate reliability considerations in the player's utility function, and analyze static properties of the game as well as its dynamic evolution. We provide dynamic analysis of its topological quantities, and explain the prevalence of some "network motifs" in the Internet graph. We assess our predictions with real-world data.