IBM Research
Leveraging Attention
Scarcity to Improve the
Overall User Experience
of Cloud Services
Marco Netto, Marcos Assunção
and Silvia Bianchi
© 2013 IBM Corporation
Background
 Large volumes of data are produced every day
 Increasing use of mobile devices *
 Around 700 million smartphones shipped a year
 1.5 billion mobile broadband subscriptions by end 2013
 Cloud-computing as a platform to support user services
 Multiple devices and media multi-tasking
 53% of UK adults media multi-task while watching TV **
 Users expect other devices to augment content shown on TV ***
* The State of Broadband 2013: Universilizing Broadband,
Broadband Commission, Sep. 2013.
** The Communications Market Report: United Kingdom,
Ofcom, Aug. 2013.
*** Five insights into consumers’ online video viewing and
buying habits, Accenture Point of View, No. 2 Jul. 2013.
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Motivation
 Applications, information and media are abundant, attention is
scarce
 Cloud is elastic, but resources are limited
 Current devices can provide more honest signals on user
behaviour and their profiles *
 When do users actually consume the results of their requests?
* http://www.drawbrid.ge
http://www.flurry.com/
http://www.velti.com
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Illustrative Scenario and Research Question
 User switches across multiple applications
Game
App
?
?
Active
Apps
 Can these signals on service consumption be used to differentiate the
processing of requests, optimise the use of Cloud resources, and deliver
better user experience?
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Problem Description
 Consider two service requests, req1 and req2, made by two distinct users
 User patience di = tci – rti where d < 0 means user is angry
 User experience ue is modelled using principles from prospect theory,
where d < 0 translates into worse ue than under |d|
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 Goals of the present work:
 Minimising the distance between consumption
time and response time
 Investigate the impact on overall user
experience
 Outline:
 Adaptive QoS architecture
 Request prioritisation strategy
 Experimental evaluation
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Adaptive QoS Architecture
QoS Setup
Service
User Device
Cloud App1
IT Infrastructure
Service
1
Cloud App2
Service
2
Local App
Service
n
Sensors
QoS Setup
Assistant
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Cloud Service
Provider
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2013
QoS Setup Service
 Determines the user context
 Monitors how users interact with a service
 Patience-aware Prioritisation (PaP):
1. Obtains the expected time before consumption and
average response time
2. Determines the user’s patience
3. Prioritises users who have less patience
4. To avoid starvation, a user’s patience decreases as
her requests waits to be served
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Experimental Setup
 Built-in-house discrete event simulator
 One service able to handle 100 requests at a time
 Two categories of users, namely multi-task and single task
 tc’s of single-task and multi-task users are 2 and 10 seconds respectively
 Requests have fixed processing length
 Evaluation under three
Scenario1
* C. Cardonha, M. Assuncao, M. Netto,
R. Cunha, C. Queiroz, Patience-aware
Scheduling for Cloud Services:
Freeing Users from the Chains of
Boredom, ICSOC 2013.
Load (%)
workload scenarios, comparing
PaP against a FCFS
(standard) policy *
Scenario2
Scenario3
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240 260 280
Time (secs)
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Overall User Patience
User Patience (secs)
PaP
Standard
6
4
2
Single-task users
0
s1
s2
PaP
s3
Standard
Scenarios
Multi-task users
User Patience (secs)
0.0
−0.5
−1.0
−1.5
−2.0
−2.5
s1
s2
s3
Scenarios
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User Experience (Scenario 3)
PaP strategy
Standard strategy
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User Experience (Scenario 2)
PaP strategy
Standard strategy
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Final Remarks
 Important to understand how users consume results of
Cloud services and to optimise the utilisation or resources or
enhance user experience
 An architecture for leveraging more honest signals
 A simple strategy to prioritise user requests *
 Possible to improve user experience without heavily impact
on users who multi-task
 Proposed strategy is suitable to peak load conditions
*
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C. Cardonha, M. Assuncao, M. Netto, R. Cunha, C. Queiroz, Patienceaware Scheduling for Cloud Services: Freeing Users from the Chains of
Boredom, ICSOC 2013.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2013
Thank you for
your attention!
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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2013