Modeling and Analysis of HTTP Traffic

The global Internet has seen tremendous growth in terms of nodes and user base as well as of types of applications. One of the most important consequences of this growth is related to an increased complexity of the traffic experienced in these networks. Each application has a set of unique characteristics in terms of performance characteristics, transactions as well as the way the transaction processing profile maps onto unique network resource requirements. In order to support Internet applications effectively,it is therefore important to understand and to characterize the application level transactions as well as the effect of different TCP/IP control mechanisms on application-level parameters. It is the goal of this paper to model and to evaluate the characteristics of World Wide Web traffic. Results are reported on measuring, modeling and analysis of specific Hyper Text Transfer Protocol traffic collected from different (classes of) sites together with methodologies used for capturing HTTP flows as well as for modeling. The paper concludes with a discussion on the structure of Web pages and a model for the generation of the number of embedded pages in a Web page is suggested