It ain't what you charge, it's the way that you do it: a user perspective of network QoS and pricing

Abstract

Shared networks, such as the Internet, are fast becoming able to support heterogeneous applications and a diverse user community. In this climate, it becomes increasingly likely that some form of pricing mechanism will be necessary in order to manage the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of different applications. So far, research in this area has focussed on technical mechanisms for implementing QoS and charging. This paper reports a series of studies in which users' perceptions of QoS, and their attitudes to a range of pricing mechanisms, were investigated. We found that users' knowledge and experience of networks, and the real-world Task they perform with applications, determine their evaluation of QoS and attitude to payment. Users' Payment Behavior is governed by their level of Confidence in the performance of salient QoS parameters. User Confidence, in turn, depends on a number of other factors. In conclusion, we argue that charging models that undermine User Con$dence are not only undesirable from the users' point of view, but may also lead to user behavior that may have a negative impact on QoS.

Integrating user-perceived quality into Web server design

“…Establishing a mapping between objective and subjective QoS is perhaps the most direct way research can enable servers to be designed to provide maximum utility. A common finding from previous research is that QoS delivered by servers must accord with users' expectations in order to be perceived as acceptable [6] [7]. Objective measurements, such as response time and delay cannot, however, fully characterize the factors that drive these expectations.…”

“…Objective measurements, such as response time and delay cannot, however, fully characterize the factors that drive these expectations. A consistent finding is that QoS received by users should concur with their expectations but that these expectations change according to the pattern of quality received [7,10]. The characterization of factors that impact users' expectations is complicated by the fact that many such factors are interrelated.…”

“…The characterization of factors that impact users' expectations is complicated by the fact that many such factors are interrelated. For example, Web pages that are retrieved faster are judged to be significantly more interesting than their slower counterparts [31], and users may judge a relatively fast service to be unacceptable unless it is also predictable, visually appealing and reliable [7]. Indeed, the weight of evidence from prior research suggests that there is no direct correlation between objective levels of quality received by users and their perceptions of that quality.…”

Achieving Class-Based QoS for Transactional Workloads

“…In addition to desiring low mean response time, users are equally desirous of low variability in response times [5]. Both W CP U and W IO benchmarks are composed of a fixed set of transaction types.…”

“…In addition to perclass response time and percentile targets, another common QoS target is to provide low variability in response times. The reason is that users may judge a relatively fast service still unacceptable unless it is also predictable [5,11,25].…”