A QoE-perceived screen updates transmission scheme in desktop virtualization environment

As a solution for cloud computing, desktop virtualization realizes the remote execution of applications and feeds back execution results in the form of ”screen updates” through network, aiming to offer users the same experience as operating in local systems. It is challenging to achieve this goal since timeliness and reliability should be both guaranteed during the process of screen updates transmission, but the two requirements tend to be difficult to be satisfied simultaneously. Reliable transmission will induce more latency to perform reliable mechanisms, which can influence the timely delivery of screen updates. Timely transmission just provides a best-effort data delivery service, failing to react well to unfavorable network conditions. In order to cope with this problem, we propose a Partially Reliable Transmission Scheme (PRTS) for screen updates transmission in desktop virtualization environment. It tries to make trade-offs between timeliness and reliability and employs a QoE-perceived model to sense the visual quality experienced by users. Distinguished with existing transmission schemes, PRTS adjusts its sending strategy not only according to current network conditions, but also according to users’ QoE. The experimental results show that PRTS can improve the transmission efficiency of screen updates and also the visual quality in desktop virtualization environment under different network conditions.