An empirical model of HTTP network traffic

The workload of the global Internet is dominated by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), an application protocol used by World Wide Web clients and servers. Simulation studies of IP networks require a model of the traffic patterns of the World Wide Web, in order to investigate the effects of this increasingly popular application. We have developed an empirical model of network traffic produced by HTTP. Instead of relying on server or client logs, our approach is based on packet traces of HTTP conversations. Through traffic analysis, we have determined statistics and distributions for higher-level quantities such as the size of HTTP files, the number of files per "Web page", and user browsing behavior. These quantities form a model can then be used by simulations to mimic World Wide Web network applications.

[1]  Azer Bestavros,et al.  Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: evidence and possible causes , 1997, TNET.

[2]  J. Postel,et al.  File transfer protocol (FTP) , 1985 .

[3]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Empirically derived analytic models of wide-area TCP connections , 1994, TNET.

[4]  Azer Bestavros,et al.  Self-similarity in World Wide Web traffic: evidence and possible causes , 1996, SIGMETRICS '96.

[5]  Mark Crovella,et al.  Characteristics of WWW Client-based Traces , 1995 .

[6]  Allison Woodruff,et al.  An Investigation of Documents from the World Wide Web , 1996, Comput. Networks.

[7]  Carey L. Williamson,et al.  Internet Web servers: workload characterization and performance implications , 1997, TNET.

[8]  Peter B. Danzig,et al.  Characteristics of wide-area TCP/IP conversations , 1991, SIGCOMM '91.

[9]  Michelle Butler,et al.  A Scalable HTTP Server: The NCSA Prototype , 1994, Comput. Networks ISDN Syst..

[10]  Jeffrey C. Mogul,et al.  The case for persistent-connection HTTP , 1995, SIGCOMM '95.

[11]  Roy T. Fielding,et al.  Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.1 , 1997, RFC.

[12]  Roy T. Fielding,et al.  Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.0 , 1996, RFC.

[13]  Tim Bray,et al.  Measuring the Web , 1996, World Wide Web J..

[14]  Ray Jain,et al.  The art of computer systems performance analysis - techniques for experimental design, measurement, simulation, and modeling , 1991, Wiley professional computing.

[15]  Jeffrey C. Mogul,et al.  Improving HTTP Latency , 1995, Comput. Networks ISDN Syst..

[16]  James E. Pitkow,et al.  Characterizing Browsing Strategies in the World-Wide Web , 1995, Comput. Networks ISDN Syst..

[17]  Greg Minshall,et al.  Flow labelled IP: a connectionless approach to ATM , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '96. Conference on Computer Communications.

[18]  Domenico Ferrari,et al.  Quality of service and asynchronous transfer mode in ip internetworks , 1996 .

[19]  George Kingsley Zipf,et al.  Human behavior and the principle of least effort , 1949 .

[20]  Bruce A. Mah,et al.  On the Use of Quality of Service in IP over ATM , 1997 .

[21]  Martin F. Arlitt,et al.  Web server workload characterization: the search for invariants , 1996, SIGMETRICS '96.

[22]  Tim Berners-Lee,et al.  Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 , 1995, RFC.