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Measurement and Analysis of HTTP Traffic

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The usage of Internet is rapidly increasing and a large part of the Internet traffic is generated by the World Wide Web (WWW) and the associated protocol HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Several important parameters that affect the performance of the WWW are bandwidth, scalability, and latency. To tackle these parameters and to improve the overall performance of the system, it is important to understand and to characterize the application level characteristics. This article is reporting on the measurement and analysis of HTTP traffic collected on the student access network at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. The analysis is done on various HTTP traffic parameters, e.g., inter-session timings, inter-arrival timings, request message sizes, response code, and number of transactions. The reported results can be useful for building synthetic workloads for simulation and benchmarking purposes.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors gratefully acknowledge Dragos Ilie and David Erman at BIT, whose comments were helpful for handling various practical issues.

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Correspondence to Yogesh Bhole.

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Yogesh Bhole received Master of Science in Electrical Engineering with emphasis on Telecommunications from Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Blekinge, Sweden in August 2004 and Bachelor of Electronics Engineering from VJTI, University of Mumbai, India in June 2003. He is enrolled in Master's program in Applied Electronics with a major in Wireless Communication at Umeå University for the academic year 2004–2005. His research interests are Internet traffic measurement and analysis, Mathematical modeling of network traffic, Ultra Wide Band Communication.

Adrian Popescu received two Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering, one from the Polytechnical Institute of Bucharest, Romania, in 1985 and another from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 1994. He has also the Docent degree in computer sciences from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden (2002). He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunication Systems, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden. His main research interests include Internet, communication architectures and protocols, traffic measurements, analysis and modeling, traffic self-similarity, as well as simulation methodologies. He is a member of the IEEE, IEEE CS, ACM, and ACM SIGCOMM.

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Bhole, Y., Popescu, A. Measurement and Analysis of HTTP Traffic. J Netw Syst Manage 13, 357–371 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-005-9000-y

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