iScreen: A Merged Screen of Local System with Remote Applications
in a Mobile Cloud Environment
Jianxin Li, Qi Song, Weiren Yu, Chunming Hu, Jian Kang
School of Computer Science and Engineering
Beihang University
Beijing, 100191, China
{lijx, songqi, yuwr, kangjian, hucm}act.buaa.edu.cn
Abstract— With the convergence of cloud computing and
mobile computing, mobile devices can access remote
applications in a cloud environment. However, existing
research work mostly focused on leveraging cloud capabilities
to enhance mobile clients. Particularly, in order to access
different cloud platforms and applications, specific version of
clients such as Web portal, Remote Desktop, are generally
required. The original display and interaction experience on
the client local system are changed. This paper presents an
approach named iScreen which keeps a consistent display and
interaction experience between local and remote applications
in a mobile cloud computing environment. iScreen consists of a
three-factor merging framework including windows merging,
meta-info merging and interaction merging for applications. We
developed a prototype of iScreen for Windows applications to
allow thin clients to seamlessly access remote cloud windows
applications. Experimental studies show that iScreen can
effectively merge local desktop with remote display, and
mobile clients can achieve 20 frames per second when running
a remote video playback application. The bandwidth usage of
iScreen is reduced by about 10% compared to UltraVNC. It
performs better especially under high-motion scenarios.
Key words: cloud computing, remote screen, merged screen,
tranmission protocol
I. INTRODUCTION
“Information at your fingertips anywhere, anytime” is a
driving vision of mobile computing. In recent years, we have
witnessed the rapid advent of mobile computing, millions of
users in the world use mobile devices such as Windows
Phone, iPhone, Android, etc. to access the Internet and
remote applications. There are lots of driven technologies to
show why which developed rapidly. First, with the upgrade
of network infrastructure especially the rapid development of
3G networks, mobile network bandwidth has been greatly
improved. Second, Cloud computing platform provides
elastic service management of large-scale resources,
effectively supports the execution of remote applications and
the management of application data. With these
developments, remote software execution technology based
on desktop virtualization has been widely adopted due to its
easy-to-use, easy-to-maintain and cross-platform advantages.
In a cloud platform, remote servers execute all applications
and transmit the execution result to the client. The device
acts as a remote display, capturing user input and rendering
display updates received from the server.
There are some representative work utilize cloud
computing infrastructure are: open-source VNC systems,
XenDesktop developed by Citrix, THINC developed by
Columbia University [1], and Muse, CyberLiveapp
by
Beihang University [2][3].
As more software executed in a cloud, client devices will
execute local and remote software at the same time. Cloud-
client convergence is becoming one of the phenomenal
modes supported by cloud platforms. However, current
systems and technologies mainly focus on extending the
mass storage and computing capability of mobile devices,
and transmitting the whole desktop of virtual machines
running different applications. To the best of our knowledge,
there is few research work on high-performance application
delivery and in-depth convergence of cloud-client display for
provide high quality of experience to the cloud users. We
have identified two key issues as follows.
First, current research can meet the basic performance
requirements of cloud-client convergence. Many systems
transmit different remote desktops to the end users
simultaneously but they cannot be effectively integrated with
local client’s display system. Without an effective merging
mechanism, user experience can be significantly degraded
when cloud and local client do not share similar operating
systems, and in scenarios when different cloud service
providers customize their own access terminal or portal
which is independent of rather than integrated with the local
client system. For example, many Google apps require the
use of Google Chrome OS to access. The execution
environment relies solely on the browser itself and separated
from the user’s operating system. Clearly, it has become a
key issue for cloud-client convergence to provide client
devices with integrated and interactive experience.
Second, as the core connection channel, remote
interactivity protocol needs to deal with interaction events
and dynamic display updates. However, current systems
directly rely on remote desktop systems designed for
traditional LAN environment. They have not considered the
characteristics of mobile devices and mobile network. Many
remote display applications, e.g., Android VNC, cannot
effectively support the video playing on mobile equipment.
Therefore, how an integrated view could provide high-
performance interactivity between cloud and client becomes
another key problem.
In this paper, we propose an approach named iScreen,
which merged local system with remote applications through
a three-factor display merging framework. The major
contributions of this paper are three-fold:
1) We developed a cloud-platform multi-application
display merging framework, called iScreen, to achieve
seamless display integration. It consists of window merging,
meta-info merging, and interaction merging to achieve
2013 IEEE Seventh International Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering
978-0-7695-4944-6/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/SOSE.2013.22
508
2013 IEEE Seventh International Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering
978-0-7695-4944-6/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/SOSE.2013.22
509