Cloud services are often provisioned to their customers using user-friendly web browsers with flexible and rich plug-in environments. Delay is one of the fundamental performance metrics of these web-based services. Commonly-used network measurement tools usually only measure network delay and it may be difficult to infer the web-delay performance using only network layer measurement approaches. In this paper, we propose to evaluate the application layer delay in a browser-based network measurement platform using engineered scripts. We conducted a delay measurement study using instrumented scripts in the proposed browser-based measurement platform. Our investigation included a comparison study of three browser-scripting delay measurement methods, including Java applet, JSP and Flash ActionScript. We developed a browser-based delay measurement testbed over the Internet so that different delay measurement tools could be evaluated in the same real network environment including typical Internet paths and the Baidu cloud. We also decomposed the components of the end-to-end delay process of the above measurements to reveal the difference and relationship between the network-layer delay and the application-layer delay. Our measurement results characterize the stochastic properties of the application-layer delay over real Internet paths, and how these properties vary from the underlying network layer delay. This browser-scripting measurement approach can be easily deployed on different cloud service platforms to inspect their application-layer delay performance between end clients and the cloud platforms. Our measurement results may provide insights into designing new cloud services with enhanced quality-of-experience perceived by cloud users.
['Chengwei Zhang', 'Xiaojun Hei', 'Wenqing Cheng']
Performance Evaluation of Web-based Cloud Services in a Browser-Scripting Approach