User impatience and network performance

In this work, we analyze from passive measurements the correlations between the user-induced interruptions of TCP connections and different end-to-end performance metrics. The aim of this study is to assess the possibility for a network operator to take into account the customers' experience for network monitoring. We first observe that the usual connection-level performance metrics of the interrupted connections are not very different, and sometimes better than those of normal connections. However, the request-level performance metrics show stronger correlations between the interruption rates and the network quality-of-service. Furthermore, we show that the user impatience could also be used to characterize the relative sensitivity of data applications to various network performance metrics.