Web content usage behavior: a case study of a university in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study characterizes the behavior of students in one of the Sub-Saharan Africa universities with respect to usage of valuable, but expensive Internet resources in a developing economy. Traffic allocation to web domains was compared with known statistical distributions such as Zipf and Stretched exponential distributions. Observed results show that traffic allocation follows stretched exponential distribution and that students use only small fraction of traffic for actual education activities and the rest of the traffic is associated with video services and social networks. The cumulative results from male and female students’ hostels show gender differences in browsing habits. More importantly, actual usage is at variance with the surveys conducted by OFCOM in UK and those conducted among students at the university, thus showing that usage patterns significantly differ from surveys result and between the users in advanced and developing economies

Network overload avoidance by traffic engineering and content caching

The Internet traffic volume continues to grow at a great rate, now driven by video and TV distribution. For network operators it is important to avoid congestion in the network, and to meet service level agreements with their customers. This thesis presents work on two methods operators can use to reduce links loads in their networks: traffic engineering and content caching. This thesis studies access patterns for TV and video and the potential for caching. The investigation is done both using simulation and by analysis of logs from a large TV-on-Demand system over four months. The results show that there is a small set of programs that account for a large fraction of the requests and that a comparatively small local cache can be used to significantly reduce the peak link loads during prime time. The investigation also demonstrates how the popularity of programs changes over time and shows that the access pattern in a TV-on-Demand system very much depends on the content type. For traffic engineering the objective is to avoid congestion in the network and to make better use of available resources by adapting the routing to the current traffic situation. The main challenge for traffic engineering in IP networks is to cope with the dynamics of Internet traffic demands. This thesis proposes L-balanced routings that route the traffic on the shortest paths possible but make sure that no link is utilised to more than a given level L. L-balanced routing gives efficient routing of traffic and controlled spare capacity to handle unpredictable changes in traffic. We present an L-balanced routing algorithm and a heuristic search method for finding L-balanced weight settings for the legacy routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. We show that the search and the resulting weight settings work well in real network scenarios

The stretched exponential distribution of Internet media access patterns

The commonly agreed Zipf-like access pattern of Web workloads is mainly based on Internet measurements when textbased content dominated the Web traffic. However, with dramatic increase of media traffic on the Internet, the inconsistency between the access patterns of media objects and the Zipf model has been observed in a number of studies. An insightful understanding of media access patterns is essential to guide Internet system design and management, including resource provisioning and performance optimizations. In this paper, we have studied a large variety of media workloads collected from both client and server sides in different media systems with different delivery methods. Through extensive analysis and modeling, we find: (1) the object reference ranks of all these workloads follow the stretched exponentia