Internet

This article is about the Internet, the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term informally used to describe any set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking.

A complex system

Many computer scientists see the Internet as a "prime example of a large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system" (Willinger, et al). The Internet is extremely heterogeneous. (For instance, data transfer rates and physical characteristics of connections vary widely.) The Internet exhibits "emergent phenomena" that depend on its large-scale organization. For example, data transfer rates exhibit temporal self-similarity.

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