Experiment and Analysis for QoS of E-Commerce Systems

It is important for electronic commerce companies to understand the service quality of their systems, such as, the response time for users’ interactions, the service delay zone and the number of appropriate users accessing the systems concurrently. The accurate and prompt management of the service quality can greatly help build and operate systems more efficiently. In this paper we present a methodology for the service quality measurement and the user capacity modeling for electronic commerce systems. While most previous researches on this issue have been based on the closed-LAN environment, we conduct experiments under real network environment using sample e-Commerce systems. Specifically, we measure the response times for e-Commerce transactions under Cable, DSL, and wireless networks, and analyze the delay zones in processing the users’ service requests. The discrete event simulation and hybrid simulation are performed to estimate the maximum number of users using a response time limit as the service quality criterion. We also investigate the self-similar characteristics on the response time and the number of users, and the extensive results of the experiment and the simulations are described.