YouTube & Facebook Quality of Experience in mobile broadband networks

YouTube and Facebook are two of the most consumed applications in today´s Internet. Together they account for more than 30% of the overall Internet´s traffic volume and span more than half of the Internet users worldwide. Such popularity has attracted a growing interest from the research community, particularly regarding content characterization, network performance, and privacy issues in these applications. Their extensive and ever-growing usage in cellular networks has also captured the attention of mobile operators, who need to engineer their systems to handle the load while providing good quality levels. In this paper we take a user-centric approach for YouTube and Facebook performance evaluation, analyzing the Quality of Experience (QoE) as assessed by a group of 33 mobile broadband users in a field trial. Spanning an evaluation period of 31 days and using their own 3.5G-connected laptops, users regularly reported their perceived experience on surfing their preferred YouTube and Facebook contents under changing network conditions, artificially modified through traffic shaping. Our approach is holistic and considers a three-layered evaluation methodology, including control and monitoring of the network-layer QoS, content monitoring at the network and application layers, and QoE assessment at the user-layer. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first results on the evaluation of different 3.5G network conditions on YouTube and Facebook from the enduser perspective, considering everyday life Web usage scenarios.