Abstract

The design of robust and reliable networks and network services has become an increasingly challenging task in today's Internet world. To achieve this goal, understanding the characteristics of Internet traffic plays a more and more critical role. Empirical studies of measured traffic traces have led to the wide recognition of self-similarity in network traffic. Moreover, a direct link has been established between the self-similar nature of measured aggregate network traffic and the underlying heavy-tailed distributions of the Web traffic at the source level. This report provides a natural and plausible explanation for the origin of heavy tails in Web traffic by introducing a series of simplified models for optimal Web layout design with varying levels of realism and analytic tractability. The basic approach is to view the minimization of the average file download time as a generalization of standard source coding for data compression, but with the design of the Web layout rather than...

Citations