PackMime-HTTP: Statistical Models for Generating HTTP Application Traffic

• Activity Number: 189
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2003 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: IMS
• Author(s): Jin Cao*+ and William S. Cleveland and Donelson Smith and Michele Weigle and Gao Yuan and Don X. Sun
• Companies: Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and Bell Laboratories and University of North Carolina and University of North Carolina and Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and Bell Laboratories
• Keywords: network simulator ; HTTP ; statistical models ; long range dependence ; application request process ; superposition

Abstract

When a host connects with another over the internet to run an application such as HTTP, which transfers web pages, a transport connection is established between the two hosts at the request of the application, and information to be transferred is broken up into packets that are sent across the internet. Today's network simulators do a stunning job of recreating the protocols and devices of the packet transfer process, but models for application request traffic have received little attention. The result is a reduction in the verisimilitude of network simulations, which are critical to network engineering. PackMime-HTTP is a collection of models for the HTTP application traffic process for clouds of hosts accessing a network. For each cloud, the models generate the superposed HTTP traffic time process. The transport, routing, and device modeling of the network simulator carry out packet-level simulation of the transport connections across the network, setting up the connections based on the HTTP requests, which are generated on the fly. PackMime-HTTP has been implemented in the NS-2 network simulator, and a number of validation studies have been carried out.