HostView: Measuring Internet quality of experience on end-hosts

There is much interest recently in doing automated performance diagnosis on user laptops or desktops. One interesting aspect of performance diagnosis that has received little attention is the user perspective on performance. To conduct research on both end-host performance diagnosis and user perception of network and application performance, we designed an end-host data collection tool, called HostView. HostView not only collects network, application and machine level data, but also gathers feedback directly from users. User feedback is obtained via two mechanisms, a system-triggered questionnaire and a user-triggered feedback form, that for example asks users to rate the performance of their network and applications. This talk will describe our experience with the first deployment of HostView. Using data from 40 users, we articulate the challenges in this line of research, and report on initial findings in correlating user data to system-level data. We then describe our more recent efforts in conducting an in-depth study with twelve users in France to guide our design of the next version of HostView and of methods to infer user context and activities.

This is joint work with Diana Joumblatt, Jaideep Chandrashekar, Nina Taft, Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen, George Rosca, Peter Tolmie, Tom Rodden, Tom Lodge, Richard Motier. This work is funded in part by the EU FP7 User-Centric Networking project, Grant No. 611001.

Renata Teixeira received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, in 2005. During her Ph.D. studies, she worked on Internet routing at the AT&T Research. She was a researcher with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at LIP6, UPMC Sorbonne Universites, Paris, France from 2006 to 2013. She joined Inria Paris-Rocquencourt as senior researcher in October 2013. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeyley/ICSI in 2011. Her research interests are in measurement, analysis, and management of data networks. She has authored more than 60 papers in this area. Renata is vice-chair of ACM SIGCOMM. She is a member of the steering committee of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference and has been active in the program committees of ACM SIGCOMM, ACM IMC, ACM CoNEXT, PAM, IEEE INFOCOM, among others.