In-Situ Quality of Experience Monitoring: The Case for Prioritizing Coverage Over Fidelity

The Internet today is largely an eyeball economy, which is driven by revenue streams that depend crucially on user-perceived application experience [1, 4, 10]. There is an increasing realization of this in the broader networking community. This is evidenced by the trends in papers in conferences (e.g., [4, 6, 11, 13]), workshops explicitly aimed at looking at performance moving up the stack and focusing on human-centric experience (e.g., [2, 3]), and many parallel industry efforts at leading content providers and content distribution companies [7, 10]. A natural requirement for different stakeholders in this eyeball economy is to optimize end user quality of experi-ence (QoE) for different applications such as web, video, voice, and so on. A fundamental requirement that we need to address even before we embark on developing system