Author(s)

Richard Hurley, Robert Sturgeon

Department of Computer Science, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to model user request patterns in the World Wide Web. Instead of focusing on the user traffic for web pages, we capture the user interaction at the object level of the web pages. Our framework model consists of three sub-models: one for user file access, one for web pages, and one for storage servers. Web pages are assumed to consist of different types and sizes of objects, which are characterized using several categories: articles, media, and mosaics. The model is implemented with a discrete event simulation and then used to investigate the performance of our system over a variety of parameters in our model. Our performance measure of choice is mean response time and by varying the composition of web pages through our categories, we find that our framework model is able to capture a wide range of conditions that serve as a basis for generating a variety of user request patterns. In addition, we are able to establish a set of parameters that can be used as base cases. One of the goals of this research is for the framework model to be general enough that the parameters can be varied such that it can serve as input for investigating other distributed applications that require the generation of user request access patterns.

Performance Modelling, World Wide Web, Simulation, User Request Access Patterns, Framework

Hurley, R. and Sturgeon, R. (2024) Framework to Model User Request Access Patterns in the World Wide Web. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 17, 69-88. doi: 10.4236/jsea.2024.172004.