Self-similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes

Recently the notion of self-similarity has been shown to apply to wide-area and local-area network traffic. In this paper we examine the mechanisms that give rise to the self-similarity of network traffic. We present a hypothesized explanation for the possible self-similarity of trac by using a particular sub-set of wide area traffic: traffic due to the World Wide Web (WWW). Using an extensive set of traces of actual user executions of NCSA Mosaic, reflecting over half a million requests for WWW documents, we examine the dependence structure of WWW trac. First, we show evidence that WWW traffic exhibits behavior that is consistent with self-similar traffic models. Then we show that the self-similarity in such traffic can be explained based on the underlying distributions of WWW document sizes, the effects of caching and user preference in le transfer, the eect of user "think time", and the superimposition of many such transfers in a local area network. To do this we rely on empirically measured distributions both from our traces and from data independently collected at over thirty WWW sites