On Traffic Patterns of HTTP Applications

HTTP has been the most popular internet protocol for 30 years. Until recently, its role has been limited to a traditional transfer of hypertext documents. However, its flexibility and interoperability cause it to be progressively involved in a much wider range of applications, from video and audio streaming to email, chat and documents editing. Understanding the behavior of modern Web applications is a crucial step to apply QoS or security policies on this traffic. This paper studies 20 popular, Web applications that are representative of 12 application types. We describe a method to isolate and capture browser-generated traffic and plot time series with an RRDTool database. We show that modern Web applications present very diverse traffic patterns, and propose a description and classification of these patterns.