Back to normal? Impact of temporally increasing network disturbances on QoE

Abstract

Brief episodes of network faults and performance issues adversely affect the user Quality of Experience (QoE). Besides damaging the current opinions of users, these events may also shape user's future perception of the service. Therefore, it is important to quantify the impact of such events on QoE over time. In this paper, we present our findings on the temporal aspects of user feedback to disturbances on networks. These findings are based on subjective user tests performed in the context of web browsing on an e-commerce website. The results of this study suggest that the QoE drops significantly every time the page load time grows. The after-effects of network disturbances on user QoE remain visible even when the network problems are over, i.e., users do not immediately return to the same level of opinion scores as compared to the corresponding pre-disturbance phase. They tend to remember their recent experiences. Our results also show that there are four segments of users that exist with regards to their feedback to page load times. Network operators may customize their services according to each segment of users to raise the overall QoE. Finally, we show that the exponential relationship provides best fits of QoE and page load times for all segments of users.