Characterizing broadband user behavior

This paper presents a characterization of broadband user behavior from a Internet service provider. Users are broken into two major categories: residential and Small-Office/Home-Office (SOHO). For each user category, the characterization is performed along four criteria: (i) session arrival process, (ii) session duration, (iii) number of bytes transferred within a session and (iv) user request patterns. Our results show that both residential and SOHO session inter-arrival times are exponentially distributed. Whereas residential session arrival rates remain relatively high during the day, SOHO session arrival rates vary much more significantly during the day. On the other hand, a typical SOHO user session is longer and transfers a larger volume of data. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers two main groups of session request patterns within each user category. Sessions from the first group use traditional Internet services, such as www, e-mail and instant messengers, and sessions from the second, a smaller group, use typically file sharing applications (peer-to-peer). This second group remains for longer periods and transfers a large amount of data. Understanding these user behavior patterns is important to the development of more efficient applications for broadband users.