Analysis of Internet topologies has shown that the Internet topology has
negative curvature, measured by Gromov's "thin triangle condition", which is
tightly related to core congestion and route reliability. In this work we
analyze the discrete Ricci curvature of the Internet, defined by Ollivier, Lin,
etc. Ricci curvature measures whether local distances diverge or converge. It
is a more local measure which allows us to understand the distribution of
curvatures in the network. We show by various Internet data sets that the
distribution of Ricci cuvature is spread out, suggesting the network topology
to be non-homogenous. We also show that the Ricci curvature has interesting
connections to both local measures such as node degree and clustering
coefficient, global measures such as betweenness centrality and network
connectivity, as well as auxilary attributes such as geographical distances.
These observations add to the richness of geometric structures in complex
network theory.Comment: 9 pages, 16 figures. To be appear on INFOCOM 201