Modelling of Quality of Experience for Web Traffic

Surfing the Web is a practical task that is being used in activities that range from bank transactions to entertainment. Web technology is advancing in order to provide its users with better quality and advanced features. Based on networking parameters, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to ensure better Quality of Service for their customers. However, a question arises concerning the assessment of this Quality of Service, since, typically it depends on an ISP's perspective, as to whether this is sufficient to infer a fair assessment of a user's experience of the service when they are the direct users of the service. Therefore it may be meaningless if an ISP guarantees that the service is good but their users are not satisfied with it. Moreover, a user's opinion, which is a subjective assessment, may not be a totally correct assessment either. In this paper we propose a new approach to measurement and analysis of Quality of Experience (QoE) where we objectively observe users' behaviour as they interact with the Web and infer their QoE. Thus our new model enables people to feedback their opinions by revealing the way in which they are interacting with the system rather than obtain an opinion via a subjective approach. This leads to the building of a measurement model that can be shown to represent a good correlation between objectively observed parameters and subjectively based parameters.