Quality of Experience from user and network perspectives Junaid Shaikh & Markus Fiedler & Denis Collange Received: 17 November 2008 / Accepted: 24 November 2009 / Published online: 17 December 2009 # Institut TELECOM and Springer-Verlag 2009 Abstract The impact of network performance on user experience is important to know, as it determines the success or failure of a service. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to assess it in real-time on an operational network. Monitoring of network-level performance criteria is easier and more usual. But the problem is then to correlate these network-level Quality of Service (QoS) to the Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by the users. Efforts have been done in the previous years to map user behaviour to traffic characteristics on the network to QoS. However, being able to successfully relate these traffic characteristics to user satisfaction is not a simple task and still requires further investigations. In this work, we try to associate on one side the correlations between various traffic characteristics measured on an operational network and on the other side the user experience tested on an experimental platform. Our aim is to observe some pronounced trends regarding relationships between both types of results. More precisely, we want to validate how and to what extent the volumes of user sessions represent the level of user satisfaction. Along this way, we need to revise classical relationships between some of the network performance indicators such as loss, download time and throughput in order to strengthen the understanding of this impact on each other and on user satisfaction. This preliminary study is based on the application web. Keywords Quality of Experience . Quality of Service . Traffic analysis . Passive measurements . Opinion Score 1 Introduction There has always been a gap of perception between the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers when talking about the performance of network service. The reason is that providers and users use different criteria to assess the performance. Service providers often use specific network-level Quality of Service (QoS) parameters like throughput, loss ratio or delay to measure service perfor- mance. These parameters are typically measured on network nodes, or between two provider's machines. In contrast, users usually perceive the service performance in more subjective and non-technical terms. They want to be served within a reasonable response time. They are uninterested in the values of these technical network parameters. This subjective perception of the users is usually called Quality of Experience (QoE). The common practice to estimate user perception from network-level performance criteria is to conduct many large experiments in a controlled environment. Some perfor- mance criteria are modified in a given range and different panels of typical users give a mean opinion score (MOS). This method has in particular been applied to voice and video traffic. However such a comprehensive practice is no more applicable today on Internet: the number of applica- tions is very high and always growing: for each application, new versions are regularly released with new functions, new traffic characteristics, new performance requirements J. Shaikh (*) : M. Fiedler Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden e-mail: junaid.junaid@bth.se M. Fiedler e-mail: markus.fiedler@bth.se D. Collange Orange Labs, Sophia-Antipolis, France e-mail: denis.collange@orange-ftgroup.com Ann. Telecommun. (2010) 65:47–57 DOI 10.1007/s12243-009-0142-x