Web metrics for the next generation performance enhancing proxies

The fast growth of Internet traffic, the growingimportance of cellular accesses and the escalating competitionbetween content providers and network operators result in agrowing interest in improving network performance and userexperience. In terms of network transport, different solutionsranging from tuning TCP to installing middleboxes are applied.It turns out, however, that the practical results sometimes aredisappointing and we believe that poor testing is one of thereasons for this. Indeed, many cases in the literature limittesting to the simple and rare use case of a single file download,while common and complex use cases like web browsing oftenare ignored or modelled only by considering smaller files. Tofacilitate better testing, we present a set of metrics by whichthe complexity around web pages can be characterised andthe potential for different optimisations can be estimated. Wealso derive numerical values of these metrics for a small set ofpopular web pages and study similarities and differences betweenpages with the same kind of content (newspapers, e-commerceand video) and between pages designed for the same platform(computer and smartphone).COST-IC130