Measurement-Based Traffic Characterization for Web 2.0 Applications

With the increase in popularity experienced by Web 2.0 applications both for personal and for business use, there is a need to study how Web 2.0 changes traffic patterns and what is the impact of Web 2.0 applications on the underlying network and server infrastructure. This paper proposes as measurement-oriented traffic characterization method that can be used for this purpose. This method is focused on analyzing and characterizing traffic up to the Transport Layer, although it can be easily extended to go beyond the Transport Layer as well. The primary focus remains at this time on traffic properties that have an impact on the network infrastructure with emphasis on applicability to the study of Quality of Service (QoS) frameworks and models. Three increasingly complex scenarios are studied using this method, and some conclusions with respect to the impact of rich media and Web 2.0 applications are drawn. Other use cases and possible extensions of the method are discussed as well.