Modeling object characteristics of dynamic Web content

Although requests for dynamic and personalized content have become a significant part of Internet traffic, there is an absence of (1) good models describing characteristics of dynamic web content, and (2) synthetic content generators, which can be used for simulation-based study of new techniques for serving such content. This paper addresses both of these shortcomings. Its primary contribution is a set of models that capture the characteristics of dynamic content at the sub-document level in terms of independent parameters such as the distributions of object sizes and their freshness times, and derived parameters such as content reusability across time and linked documents. A secondary contribution is a publicly available Java-based dynamic content emulator, DYCE, which uses these models to generate edge side include (ESI) based dynamic content in response to requests for both whole documents and separate objects.