A flexible platform for QoE-driven delivery of image-rich web applications

Abstract

The advent of content-rich modern web applications, unreliable network connectivity and device heterogeneity demands flexible web content delivery platforms that can handle the high variability along many dimensions - especially for the mobile web. Images account for more than 60% of the content delivered by present-day webpages and have a strong influence on the perceived webpage latency and end-user experience. We present a flexible web delivery platform with a client-cloud architecture and content-aware optimizations to address the problem of delivering image-rich web applications. Our solution makes use of quantitative measures of image perceptual quality, machine learning algorithms, partial caching and opportunistic client-side choices to efficiently deliver images on the web. Using data from the WWW, we experimentally demonstrate that our approach shows significant improvement on various web performance criteria that are critical for maintaining a desirable end-user quality-of-experience (QoE) for image-rich web applications.