Transactional characterization of front-end e-commerce traffic

We provide a generic model to characterize transactional behavior in an e-commerce environment which can be applied to business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce sites, Business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce sites, and other (e.g., simple browsing) type of Web-sites. The ideas presented in this paper have been derived based upon detailed examination of the e-commerce server architecture and traffic from a couple of sites. The paper also studies the characterization of embedded requests. We also discuss how the transactional and embedded request models can be used in generation of artificial front-end e-commerce traffic in the laboratory for resource engineering of servers.