Web Experience in Mobile Networks: Lessons from Two Million Page Visits

<p>Measuring and characterizing web page performance is a challenging task.</p> <p>When it comes to the mobile world, the highly varying technology characteristics coupled with the opaque network configuration make it even more difficult.</p> <p>Aiming at reproducibility, we present a large scale measurements study of web page performance collected in eleven commercial mobile networks spanning four countries.</p> <p>We build a dataset of nearly two million web browsing sessions to we shed light on the impact of different web protocols, browsers, and mobile technologies on the web performance.</p> <p>We find that the impact of mobile broadband access is sizeable.</p> <p>For example, the median page load time using mobile broadband increases by a third compared to wired access.</p> <p>Mobility clearly stresses the system, with handover causing the most evident performance penalties.</p> <p>Contrariwise, our measurements show that the adoption of HTTP/2 and QUIC has practically negligible impact.</p> <p>Our work highlights the importance of large-scale measurements.</p> <p>Even with our controlled setup, the complexity of the mobile web ecosystem is challenging to untangle.</p> <p>For this, we are releasing the dataset as open data for validation and further research.</p> <p>We also release together with the datasets we collected the scripts we use to produce the analysis we present in the paper. Please use plot_all.sh script to generate the plots in the paper, using the separate scripts from the &quot;scripts&quot; archive.&nbsp;</p> <p>Should you use any of these resources, please also make an attribution using the following reference (provided here in bibtex format):</p> <pre>@inproceedings{rajiullah2019web, title={{Web Experience in Mobile Networks: Lessons from Two Million Page Visits}}, author={Rajiullah, Mohammad and Lutu, Andra and Khatouni, Ali Safari and Fida, Mah-Rukh and Mellia, Marco and Brunstrom, Anna and Alay, Ozgu and Alfredsson, Stefan and Mancuso, Vincenzo}, booktitle={The World Wide Web Conference}, pages={1532--1543}, year={2019}, organization={ACM}, &nbsp;address = {San Francisco, CA, USA}, &nbsp;keywords = {Web Experience, &nbsp;HTTP2, QUIC, TCP, Mobile Broadband, Measurements} }</pre>