Itineration of the Internet over nonequilibrium stationary states in Tsallis statistics.

The cumulative probability distribution of sparseness time interval in the Internet is studied by the method of data analysis. Round-trip time between a local host and a destination host through ten odd routers is measured using the ping command, i.e., doing an echo experiment. The data are found to be well described by q-exponential distributions, which maximize the Tsallis entropy indexed by q less or larger than unity, showing a scale-invariant feature of the system. The network is observed to itinerate over a series of the nonequilibrium stationary states characterized by Tsallis statistics.