Impact of Device Performance on Mobile Internet QoE

A large fraction of users in developing regions use relatively inexpensive, low-end smartphones. However, the impact of device capabilities on the performance of mobile Internet applications has not been explored. To bridge this gap, we study the QoE of three popular applications -- Web browsing, video streaming, and video telephony -- for different device parameters. Our results demonstrate that the performance of Web browsing is much more sensitive to low-end hardware than that of video applications, especially video streaming. This is because the video applications exploit specialized coprocessors/accelerators and thread-level parallelism on multi-core mobile devices. Even low-end devices are equipped with needed coprocessors and multiple cores. In contrast, Web browsing is largely influenced by clock frequency, but it uses no more than two cores. This makes the performance of Web browsing more vulnerable on low-end smartphones. Based on the lessons learned from studying video applications, we explore offloading Web computation to a coprocessor. Specifically, we explore the offloading of regular expression computation to a DSP coprocessor and show an improvement of 18% in page load time while saving energy by a factor of four.