Extending HTTP models to Web 2.0 applications: The case of online social networks

Nowadays, Web 2.0 technologies are a core component of the internet. In fact, they are of key importance for many modern services, which demand a high degree of 'social' connectivity. In this perspective, online social networks (OSNs) are a paradigmatic example of this new-wave of applications, allowing to share user-generated contents, also with a high degree of interactivity. Moreover, OSNs are an appealing development platform since they can reach a vast user base. At the same time, many of their features have been progressively ported to cloud environments as to produce interactive and collaborative services. However, Web 2.0 and OSNs introduce new usage patterns reflecting specific behaviours within the resulting HTTP traffic. As a consequence, classical HTTP models could fail to properly capture the essence of the new features. The contribution of this paper is to propose an extension to standard HTTP behavioural models, by explicitly considering new elements characterising OSN applications. To this aim, it introduces a new layer of modelling defined as 'looping'. To prove the correctness of the proposed approach, a traffic analysis of a very popular OSN is presented. Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.