Verification of Web Traffic Burstiness and Self-similarity for Multiple Online Stores

Developing realistic Web traffic models is essential for a reliable Web server performance evaluation. Very significant Web traffic properties that have been identified so far include burstiness and self-similarity. Very few relevant studies have been devoted to e-commerce traffic, however. In this paper, we investigate burstiness and self-similarity factors for seven different online stores using their access log data. Our findings show that both features are present in all the analyzed e-commerce datasets. Furthermore, a strong correlation of the Hurst parameter with the average request arrival rate was discovered (0.94). Estimates of the Hurst parameter for the Web traffic in the online stores range from 0.6 for low traffic to 0.85 for heavy traffic.