Characterizing broadband user behavior

This paper presents a characterization of broadband user be-havior from an Internet Service Provider standpoint. Users are broken into two major categories: residential and Small-Office/Home-Office (SOHO). For each user category, the characterization is performed along four criteria: (i) session arrival process, (ii) session duration, (iii) number of bytes transferred within a session and (iv) user request patterns. Our results show that both residential and SOHO session inter-arrival times are exponentially distributed. Whereas res-idential session arrival rates remain relatively high during the day, SOHO session arrival rates vary much more significantly during the day. On the other hand, a typical SOHO user ses-sion is longer and transfers a larger volume of data. Fur-thermore, our analysis uncovers two main groups of session request patterns within each user category. The first group consists of user sessions that use traditional Internet services, such as e-mail, instant messenger and, mostly, www services. On the other hand, sessions from the second group, a smaller group, use typically peer-to-peer file sharing applications, re-main active for longer periods and transfer a large amount of data. Looking further into the e-business services most com-monly accessed, we found that subscription-based and adver-tising services account for the vast majority of user HTTP requests in both residential and SOHO workloads. Under-standing these user behavior patterns is important to the de-velopment of more efficient applications for broadband users. 1