Web Quality Of Experience Measurement By Using Network Processor

For Internet Service Providers, the main task is to ensure the quality of their networks and provide better service for their users, but there is always a gap of perception between ISP and users in the performance of network service. ISPs monitor the network QoS parameters to evaluate the quality of a service, but users always care their real quality of experiences(QoE) from a subjective perspective to express their satisfactions with a service. Actually, QoS parameters cannot always consistently reflect the upper layer application performance and user experience. Thus, effectively measuring the users'QoE becomes a big challenge for ISPs. HTTP is one of the major protocols in network. The Web surfing activity based on HTTP is popular among users and most related to users'QoE. In this thesis, we adopted the method of measuring the HTTP performance and user Web QoE at a Webpage level and proposed a Web user QoE measurement architecture based on network processor (NP).Firstly, traditional solutions cannot be applied in such a high-speed network and satisfy the real-time processing requirement. We introduce network processor to solve this problem. NP is a high-performance network device, which includes a set of programmable processors running in parallel to facilitate fast-packet processing. We described the structure of NP and tested the performance of NP compared to a mainstream 10GE network adapter, which led the results that NP is a preferable platform to accelerate our application.Secondly, we adopted the HTTP objects'inter-request time to group objects into WebPages, measured the HTTP performance at WebPages level and evaluated the users'QoE. Then we validated the method through experiment and were able to choose a suitable time threshold from the results.Thirdly, we proposed the Web user QoE measurement architecture based on network processor. The overall system architecture consists of packets capturing and data preprocessing module on the NP and HTTP data processing module on the online processing platform. The key idea of this architecture is to make NP in charge of complex network operations while the processing platform only responsible for HTTP data processing. By offloading packet processing procedures to its local processor, NP will release the burden of processing platform and greatly increase the whole system processing speed.Finally, we deployed our system at the 10Gbps Internet access link of the campus network of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. To validate this system, we chose different test clients in different networks and demonstrated the feasibility and accuracy of this architecture through the results.