Quality of Experience in Cloud services: Survey and measurements

Abstract Cloud-based systems are gaining enormous popularity due to a number of promised benefits, including ease of use in terms of deployment, administration and maintenance, high scalability as well as flexibility to create new services. However, as more personal and business applications migrate to the Cloud, the service quality becomes an important differentiator between providers, specially in the case of mobile operators. Quality of Experience (QoE) as perceived by the end-user has therefore the potential to become the guiding paradigm for managing quality provisioning and applications’ design in the Cloud. This paper presents the results of several Cloud QoE studies performed for different Cloud-based services, ranging from services with low requirements in terms of latency and interactivity (e.g., Cloud storage systems), multimedia On-Demand services (e.g., YouTube video streaming), communication and telepresence (e.g., Lync Online videoconferencing) to highly interactive services (e.g., Virtual Cloud Desktop). The results of these studies provide a ground truth basis for developing future Cloud services with QoE requirements, as well as for dimensioning the underlying network provisioning infrastructures, particularly with regard to mobile access technologies.

[1]  Michael Seufert,et al.  Quality of experience in remote virtual desktop services , 2013, 2013 IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2013).

[2]  B. Schneirdeman,et al.  Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction , 1998 .

[3]  Sebastian Möller,et al.  Assessment and Prediction of Speech Quality in Telecommunications , 2000 .

[4]  Raimund Schatz,et al.  Poor, Good Enough or Even Better? Bridging the Gap between Acceptability and QoE of Mobile Broadband Data Services , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[5]  Markus Fiedler,et al.  Initial delay vs. interruptions: Between the devil and the deep blue sea , 2012, 2012 Fourth International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience.

[6]  Jason Nieh,et al.  On the performance of wide-area thin-client computing , 2006, TOCS.

[7]  Xiapu Luo,et al.  Inferring the QoE of HTTP video streaming from user-viewing activities , 2011, W-MUST '11.

[8]  Ernst W. Biersack,et al.  A longitudinal view of HTTP video streaming performance , 2012, MMSys '12.

[9]  Saverio Niccolini,et al.  A closer look at thin-client connections: statistical application identification for QoE detection , 2012, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[10]  Sebastian Möller,et al.  From Single-Call to Multi-Call Quality: A Study on Long-Term Quality Integration in Audio-Visual Speech Communication , 2011, INTERSPEECH.

[11]  Tobias Hoßfeld,et al.  An Evaluation of QoE in Cloud Gaming Based on Subjective Tests , 2011, 2011 Fifth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing.

[12]  Aiko Pras,et al.  Inside dropbox: understanding personal cloud storage services , 2012, Internet Measurement Conference.

[13]  Raimund Schatz,et al.  It takes two to tango - assessing the impact of delay on conversational interactivity on perceived speech quality , 2010, INTERSPEECH.

[14]  B. Staehle,et al.  YoMo: A YouTube Application Comfort Monitoring Tool , 2010 .

[15]  Raimund Schatz,et al.  Vienna surfing: assessing mobile broadband quality in the field , 2011, W-MUST '11.

[16]  Daniel Schlosser,et al.  Improving the QoE of Citrix Thin Client Users , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications.

[17]  S. Hemminger.  Network Emulation with NetEm , 2022 .

[18]  Marco Mellia,et al.  YouTube everywhere: impact of device and infrastructure synergies on user experience , 2011, IMC '11.

[19]  Jan L. Guynes.  Impact of system response time on state anxiety , 1988, CACM.

[20]  Phuoc Tran-Gia,et al.  Quantification of YouTube QoE via Crowdsourcing , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia.

[21]  Raimund Schatz,et al.  A first look at quality of experience in Personal Cloud Storage services , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC).

[22]  Edgar R. Weippl,et al.  Dark Clouds on the Horizon: Using Cloud Storage as Attack Vector and Online Slack Space , 2011, USENIX Security Symposium.

[23]  Mahadev Satyanarayanan,et al.  Quantifying interactive user experience on thin clients , 2006, Computer.

[24]  Markus Rupp,et al.  A comparison between one-way delays in operating HSPA and LTE networks , 2012, 2012 10th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt).

[25]  Rocky K. C. Chang,et al.  Measuring the quality of experience of HTTP video streaming , 2011, 12th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2011) and Workshops.

[26]  Christian Timmerer,et al.  Challenges of QoE management for cloud applications , 2012, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[27]  Xiaowei Yang,et al.  CloudCmp: comparing public cloud providers , 2010, IMC '10.

[28]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction , 1998 .

[29]  Pedro Casas,et al.  Mini-IPC: A minimalist approach for HTTP traffic classification using IP addresses , 2013, 2013 9th International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC).

[30]  Raimund Schatz,et al.  YouTube & Facebook Quality of Experience in mobile broadband networks , 2012, 2012 IEEE Globecom Workshops.

[31]  Jeanna Neefe Matthews,et al.  The good, the bad and the ugly of consumer cloud storage , 2010, OPSR.

[32]  Valentin Kulyk,et al.  Subjective quality assessment of video conferences and telemeetings , 2012, 2012 19th International Packet Video Workshop (PV).

[33]  P. Reichl,et al.  Quality-of-Experience Beyond MOS : Experiences with a Holistic User Test Methodology for Interactive Video Services , 2010 .