Round-trip time mitigation through speculative display updating for applications rendered in the cloud

摘要

The advantages of cloud computing have revitalized interest in thin client computing. In this thin client computing approach, an application is executed on the thin client server, which in the cloud computing paradigm is part of a cloud environment. The user interacts with a viewer, that acts as a service-hatch: forwarding the user events over the network to the server and accepting the returned graphical updates. The major downside to this approach is that at least one network round trip time (RTT) is required to present the application output that results from the user's actions. In this paper a novel speculative display mechanism is proposed to mitigate the RTT requirement. The mechanism relies on online server side profiling of the graphical output that follows user events, that after synchronization with the viewer is used to speculatively update the viewer's screen content upon receipt of user events. This way, the impression is created that the network delay is decreased.