Evaluation of relationship between network performance and Web usability considering the hierarchical structure of the QoS with path analysis

As web services run on the Internet, the deterioration communication quality on the Internet has a great influence on Web usability. The communication quality(QoS) has a hierarchical structure because the Internet architecture is also hierarchical. This paper studies the relationship between multiple communication quality evaluations between layers, including quality of experience. In order to do so, we propose the evaluation method by using path analysis to evaluate the effects on Web usability. The experimental results show that satisfaction, one of the scales for Web usability, has a strong relationship with the number of packet retransmission per unit time in TCP layer and it was influenced by packetloss in IP layer indirectly. As a consequence, we confirmed the effectiveness of the evaluation method by using path analysis.