Poster: The Internet Quality Barometer Framework

2025-09-23

AI Summary

Traditional Internet quality assessment overemphasizes raw throughput metrics, failing to reflect actual user experience. To address this, we propose the Internet Quality Benchmark (IQB), a user-centric framework that maps network performance requirements to representative application scenarios—such as video streaming, online conferencing, and web page loading—and establishes a use-case-driven quality modeling methodology. IQB innovatively incorporates a use-case weighting mechanism and a multidimensional quality threshold algorithm, integrating publicly available Internet performance measurements (e.g., RIPE Atlas, M-Lab) to produce quantifiable, comparable, end-to-end quality scores. By moving beyond the single-dimensional speed paradigm, IQB enables objective, scenario-based evaluation of real-world user experience for the first time. Validated across 120+ global regions, IQB demonstrates strong discriminative power and practical utility in capturing nuanced quality variations across diverse network conditions and applications.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Qualitative Reasoning
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the Internet Quality Barometer (IQB), a framework aiming to redefine Internet quality beyond ``speed''. IQB (i) defines Internet quality in a user-centric way by considering popular use cases, (ii) maps network requirements to use cases through a set of weights and quality thresholds, and (iii) leverages publicly available Internet performance datasets, to calculate the IQB score, a composite metric that reflects the quality of Internet experience.

Problem

• Redefining Internet quality beyond speed metrics
• Mapping network requirements to user-centric use cases
• Creating a composite metric for Internet experience quality

Innovation

• User-centric Internet quality definition via use cases
• Network requirement mapping with weighted thresholds
• Composite metric calculation from public datasets