Measuring Web Quality of Experience in Cellular Networks

Measuring and understanding the end-user browsing Quality of Experience (QoE) is crucial to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to retain their customers and increase revenue. MNOs often use traffic traces to detect the bottlenecks and study their end-users experience. Recent studies show that Above The Fold (ATF) time better approximates the user browsing QoE compared to traditional metrics such as Page Load Time (PLT). This work focuses on developing a methodology to measure the web browsing QoE over operational Mobile Broadband (MBB) networks. We implemented a web performance measurement tool WebLAR (it stands for Web Latency And Rendering) that measures web Quality of Service (QoS) such as TCP connect time, and Time To First Byte (TTFB) and web QoE metrics including PLT and ATF time. We deployed WebLAR on 128 MONROE (a European-wide mobile measurement platform) nodes, and conducted two weeks long (May and July 2018) web measurement campaign towards eight websites from six operational MBB networks. The result shows that, in the median case, the TCP connect time and TTFB in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks are, respectively, 160% and 30% longer than fixed-line networks. The DNS lookup time and TCP connect time of the websites varies significantly across MNOs. Most of the websites do not show a significant difference in PLT and ATF time across operators. However, Yahoo shows longer ATF time in Norwegian operators than that of the Swedish operators. Moreover, user mobility has a small impact on the ATF time of the websites. Furthermore, the website design should be taken into consideration when approximating the ATF time.