Modeling World Wide Web request traffic
John T. Judge, H. W. Peter Beadle, J.F. Chicharo · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
We present an analysis of the arrival process for world-wide web (WWW) request traffic at the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) level. Examination of three separate HTTP traffic datasets shows that the arrival process of HTTP request packets is not Poisson and does not appear to be tending towards Poisson as the number of aggregated traffic sources increase. Based on statistical comparison with common probability distributions we postulate a model for HTTP request traffic with lognormally distributed interarrival times and an invariant shape parameter of 1.0. However, a simulation study indicates that the estimate of response time performance for a WWW proxy server is insensitive to the choice of our model of lognormally distributed HTTP request interarrival times in place of the Poisson arrival process assumption.