Deployable models for approximating web QoE metrics from encrypted traffic

Being on endpoints, Content Providers can easily evaluate end users’ web browsing quality of experience (web QoE) by accessing in-browser computed application-level metrics. Because of end-to-end traffic encryption, it is becoming considerably harder for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to evaluate the web QoE of their customers, which is important for management purposes. In this paper, we propose data-driven machine learning techniques and exact flow-level algorithmic methods to infer well-known application-level web performance metrics (such as SpeedIndex and Page Load Time) from raw encrypted streams of network traffic. We prove the efficiency of our approach taking as input a unique dataset of more than 200,000 experiments, targeting a large set of popular pages (Alexa top-500), from probes from several ISPs networks, with different browsers (Chrome, Firefox) and viewport combinations. Results show that our data-driven models are not only accurate for several web performance metrics, but also feature the ability to generalize to previously unseen conditions. Furthermore, we discuss how our extremely lightweight flow-level method has a provable accuracy on a specific metric, and is thus of particular appeal from a deployment viewpoint.