Characterization of HTTP behavior on access networks in Web 2.0

The traffic generated by the hypertext transfer protocol has a dominating position in current Internet traffic. The analyzing and characterizing of HTTP traffic is significant for understanding the nature of Internet traffic. Many studies on HTTP traffic were carried out when HTTP 1.1 appeared. Along with the prevailing of Web 2.0 the research on new features of HTTP traffic becomes a new issue in network measuring. In this paper comprehensive characterization of both the user behavior and the transportation feature on HTTP traffic are discussed. The characterization of HTTP behavior at HTTP conversation, TCP connection and Web flow level is parsed based on data collected on-line from access link of an institutepsilas LAN with more than 1500 users. The HTTP request and response length, temporal characteristics of HTTP message, and the interval of TCP connections as well as Web flows are discussed in detail. Some transformations of the investigated characterization caused by the influence of Web 2.0 are discovered in the experiment contrasting with previous result.