Experimental law that originally stated that in a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. The term Zipf’s distribution is commonly used to refer to any of a family of related power law probability distributions. These kind of distributions are observed in many kinds of phenomena and are characterized by the fact that for large values of the independent variable the distribution decays polinomially with exponent extrictly bigger than one. The frequency of access to Web pages and keyword usage in search engines obey Zipf’s law.
Published in Chapter:
Performance Analysis and Models of Web Traffic
Federico Montesino Pouzols (University of Seville, Spain), Angel Barriga Barros (University of Seville, Spain), Diego R. Lopez (RedIRIS, Spain), and Santiago Sánchez-Solano (CSIC - Scientific Research Council, Spain)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 8
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-885-7.ch157
Abstract
The Internet and, more specifically, Web-based applications now provide the first-ever global, easy-to-use, ubiquitous and economical communications channel. Most companies have already automated their operations to some extent, which enhances their ability to interact with other companies electronically. With the advent of Web services, the interaction between companies becomes easier and more transparent (Khalaf, Curbera, Nagy, Tai, Mukhi, & Duftler, 2005). Web-based technologies are extensively employed and support core components of virtual and networked organizations. Many of them, including for instance Web-based communities, heavily rely on Web traffic. Additionally, Web technologies play a central role in the technologies for supporting industrial virtual enterprises (VE) being developed by the National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols Consortium (NIIIP). Thus, modelling and analysis techniques for Web traffic become important tools for performance analysis of virtual organizations (Malhotra, 2000; Foster, Kesselman, & Tuecke, 2001). This article overviews current models of Web traffic as well as performance analysis of Web-based systems.