Characterizing HTTP Traffic of Mobile Internet Services in Provincial Network

With the rapid increasing impact of the mobile Internet on people's daily life, accessing the Internet via mobile devices is showing an obvious trend, which brings a large amount of network traffic at the same time. This paper analyzes HTTP traffic characteristics based on real world data collected from a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) in charge of some regions of China. We investigate the variation characteristics of HTTP traffic over time. Five common types of HTTP messages are also presented with their percentages in real network environment. In Particular, after the analysis of the distributions of HTML reply lengths and HTTP header numbers, we see the relationship between them can be described as linearity, which can be much instructive to some engineering works. Furthermore, we find the tag is not contained in a majority of HTML messages by extracting their HTML heads in accordance with certain rules. In this paper, we design a data acquisition system applied in the mobile Internet which can evaluate the load of network traffic by capturing and processing packets real-timely and efficiently.