The Technical Committee on Communication Behavior Engineering addresses the research question “How do we construct a communication network system that includes users?”. The growth in highly functional networks and terminals has brought about greater diversity in users' lifestyles and freed people from the restrictions of time and place. Under this situation, the similarities of human behavior cause traffic aggregation and generate new problems in terms of the stabilization of network service quality. This paper summarizes previous studies relevant to communication behavior from a multidisciplinary perspective and discusses the research approach adopted by the Technical Committee on Communication Behavior Engineering.

With the rapid growth of high performance ICT (Information Communication Technologies) devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs, multitasking has become one of the popular ways of using mobile devices. The reasons users have adopted multitask operation are that it reduces the level of dissatisfaction regarding waiting time and makes effective use of time by switching their attention from the waiting process to other content. This is a good solution to the problem of waiting; however, it may cause another problem, which is the increase in traffic volume due to the multiple applications being worked on simultaneously. Thus, an effective method to control throughput adapted to the multitasking situation is required. This paper proposes a transmission rate control method for web browsing that takes multitasking behavior into account and quantitatively demonstrates the effect of service by two different field experiments. The main contribution of this paper is to present a service design process for a new transmission rate control that takes into account human-network interaction based on the human-centered approach. We show that the degree of satisfaction in relation to waiting time did not degrade even when a field trial using a testbed showed that throughput of the background task was reduced by 40%.