The memory effect and its implications on web QoE modeling

Quality of Experience (QoE) has gained enormous attention during the recent years. So far, most of the existing QoE research has focused on audio and video streaming applications, although HTTP traffic carries the majority of traffic in the residential broadband Internet. However, existing QoE models for this domain do not consider temporal dynamics or historical experiences of the user's satisfaction while consuming a certain service. This psychological influence factor of past experience is referred to as the memory effect. The first contribution of this paper is the identification of the memory effect as a key influence factor for Web QoE modeling based on subjective user studies. As second contribution, three different QoE models are proposed which consider the implications of the memory effect and imply the required extensions of the basic models. The proposed Web QoE models are described with a) support vector machines, b) iterative exponential regressions, and c) two-dimensional hidden Markov models.