D. Pesch et al. (Eds.): MONAMI 2013, LNICST 125, pp. 202–215, 2013. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2013 Enhancing Quality of Experience (QoE) Assessment Models for Web Traffic Amanpreet Singh 1 , Ahmed Mahmoud 1 , Andreas Koensgen 1 , Xi Li 1 , Carmelita Göerg 1 , Mehmet Kus 2 , Muhsin Kayralci 2 , and Jasmin Grigutsch 2 1 University of Bremen Otto-Hahn-Allee 1, 28359 Bremen Germany {aps,ahmed,ajk,xili,cg}@comnets.uni-bremen.de 2 OTARIS Interactive Services GmbH Fahrenheitstr. 7, 28359 Bremen Germany {kus,kayralci,grigutsch}@otaris.de Abstract. Web applications are becoming the key services in today’s networks (both fixed networks and mobile networks). Consideration of web service quality has become essential to provide the end users with satisfying Quality of Experience (QoE). In order to evaluate and manage the web quality, methods for QoE assessment are desired to estimate the service quality perceived by the end users. In this paper, we study a number of existing objective quality assessment models for assessing the QoE of web applications, and compare their performance with simulations to find out their individual advantages and limitations to use in practice. Simulation results show that the proposed QoE model can be applied for evaluating the quality of different web sources in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, considering the lossy property of mobile networks. A fitting model is presented to describe the correlation between network Quality of Service and User QoE obtained in subjective lab test. To overcome the shortcomings of the existing models, this paper also proposes an enhanced QoE model which considers the effects of parameters such as page download size and content, browser cache setting as well as the packet losses and connection throughput in quality assessment e.g., page response time. To study other user related aspects in the evaluation of QoE, subjective tests in real systems and environments are planned as the next step. Keywords: Web, Quality of Experience, Quality of Service, Modeling. 1 Introduction Web applications have always been the key service with the onset of the Internet in both fixed and mobile networks. To provide a high-quality web service for the users, evaluating and managing the quality properly is extremely important. The normal Quality of Service (QoS) measurements that reflect the technical parameters of a service, however, do not reflect the user’s perception of the obtained performance. Therefore, in the recent years attention has widely been paid on the concept of Quality of experience (QoE).