  We model World Wide Web (WWW) servers and clients running over an ATM network
using the ABR (available bit rate) service. The WWW servers are modeled using a
variant of the SPECweb96 benchmark, while the WWW clients are based on a model
by Mah. The traffic generated by this application is typically bursty, i.e., it
has active and idle periods in transmission. A timeout occurs after given
amount of idle period. During idle period the underlying TCP congestion windows
remain open until a timeout expires. These open windows may be used to send
data in a burst when the application becomes active again. This raises the
possibility of large switch queues if the source rates are not controlled by
ABR. We study this problem and show that ABR scales well with a large number of
bursty TCP sources in the system.
