Establishing Waiting Time Thresholds in Interactive Web Mapping Applications for Network QoE Management

Customer expectations will continue to drive communication service developers to optimise their use of network resources based on user satisfaction. Thus, network platforms need to be remodelled from Quality of Service (QoS) centric to Quality of Experience (QoE) aware platforms. The perceived QoE for interactive web applications such as Google maps or Openstreetmaps is dominated by waiting time, i.e. the perceived time to render the page and map. Studies have explored waiting time estimation for Web QoE applications (e.g. email, downloads, web pages). Perceived waiting time for web mapping applications have been less comprehensively explored. The relationship between perceived waiting time and network QoS is a key QoE management factor to enable QoE aware networks. In this paper, we review the principle of network QoE management and the perception of waiting times. We present experimental design and methodology that facilitate the identification of waiting time thresholds for web applications, using web maps as a use case. We outline our results along with a statistical analysis and discussion interpreting the results and their applications. Finally, we discuss follow-up experiments and how they could be developed and applied in the network QoE management.