The influence of network quality fluctuations on Web QoE

Although web applications are well known for performance variations during a session, the impact of network quality fluctuations on user-perceived quality has been neglected so far in QoE research. In this paper, we present the results of two subjective lab experiments which investigated the influence of outages, throughput alternations and increasing/decreasing throughput on Web QoE. We found that interactive applications like Google Maps are heavily impaired by outages, whereas less interactive scenarios like browsing a News Site are more tolerant. Surprisingly, the alternation frequency had no significant effect on subjective quality evaluation. Our results represent a first step towards reliable assessment and modeling of the impact of quality fluctuations on Web QoE.