Modeling of HTTP traffic

Abstract

In this letter, the authors show that the behavior of Web users strongly affects the dynamics of TCP connections in the Internet. Analyzing actual and systematically generated HTTP traces, it is proved that the time between the downloads of two pages is critical to determine the re-utilization of connections. On the other hand, the use of the 1.1 version of the HTTP standard does not significantly affect the traffic generated by HTTP 1.0 browsers. In this sense, the heavy-tailed nature of the size of HTTP connections can be considered an invariant property.