Accepted for publication in the Computer Communication journal.
In this paper, we use sophisticated application-level evaluations to extract traffic characteristics and performance measures for HTTP, SMTP and POP3 from traffic traces. The process of loading Web pages by real browsers using persistent and parallel connections is studied in detail, revealing statistics about the elements in Web pages as well as the number of parallel connections and the accumulated waiting time during Web page loads.
The main results are:
(1) High variance distributions are not only found
as expected in file sizes, but also in the number of
items in a Web page, the number of e-mails transmitted
in one connection, the duration of SMTP command exchanges
or even the users' viewing times for Web pages.
(2) Web browsers utilize more parallel connections than usually expected
to simultaneously load items.
(3) A large portion of the delay in Web page retrievals
or e-mail transfers is due to serial waiting and can therefore
not be significantly reduced by increasing bandwidths.
Therefore, low latency is as much an issue in access systems as
high bandwidth.