An Empirical Model of HTTP Network Traffic 1 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 this envi-ronment will require a model of the traffic patterns of the World Wide Web, in order to investigate the performance aspects 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 gathering packet traces of HTTP network conversations. Through traffic anal-ysis, we have determined statistics and distributions for higher-level quantities such as the size of HTTP items retrieved, the number of items per “Web page”, think time, and user browsing behav-ior. These quantities form a model can then be used by simulations to mimic World Wide Web net-work applications in wide-area IP internetworks