A first look at quality of experience in Personal Cloud Storage services

Personal Cloud Storage and File Synchronization (CSFS) applications such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Sky Drive among others are rapidly gaining attention within the Internet community. Recent studies have shown that just Dropbox can account for a traffic volume as high as one third of the YouTube traffic in campus networks, evidencing an overwhelming growing popularity. In this paper we take a user-centric approach for evaluating the performance of personal CSFS applications, analyzing the Quality of Experience (QoE) as assessed by a group of 52 users in controlled lab tests. Participants assessed their overall experience and acceptability of current CSFS applications using The Box, a Dropbox-like application that permits to emulate a CSFS application in terms of different access technologies (i.e., access bandwidth) and RTT to the storage servers, controlling as such the experience of the end-user and the interaction of the application with the network. This paper provides a first look to the QoE problem in personal CSFS applications, giving concrete steps in the novel and emerging Cloud QoE domain.