Statistical similarities between internetquakes and earthquakes

The temporal behavior of the Internet is studied by performing the Ping experiment. Analyzing the time series data of the round-trip time of Ping signals, similarities between the Internet and earthquake as complex systems are discussed. Sudden drastic changes of the Internet time series are regarded as main shocks or catastrophes, referred to here as “internetquakes”. By analogy with earthquakes, magnitude of the internetquakes is appropriately defined. Then, two known empirical power laws for earthquakes, the Omori law for the temporal pattern for aftershocks and the Gutenberg–Richter law for the relationship between frequency and magnitude, are found to hold also for the Internet. Thus, the internet shares with earthquakes common scale-invariant features in its temporal behaviors.