The Impact of Waiting Time Distributions on QoE of Task-Based Web Browsing Sessions

Abstract: There has been an enormous growth in the Internet usage in recent years, fueled by the increasing number of multimedia applications and widespread availability of World Wide Web (WWW). The end-user generally accesses these applications through web browsing activities. These time-critical services often suffer from the delays ranging from small chunks to long peaks which can have severe implications on the Quality of Experience (QoE). Hence, it is worthwhile to identify the impact of different variations of delay on the end-user QoE. This research focused on the end-user QoE for three different distributions of delays occurring during an e-commerce shopping experiment. By keeping the overall waiting time of every sessions same, the study shows that the end-user QoE is different for different variety of delays. And the research also concludes that, the users prefer small frequently occurring delays as compared to the long rarely occurring delays within a task-driven web browsing session.