7,869 research outputs found

    A Discussion of Thin Client Technology for Computer Labs

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    Computer literacy is not negotiable for any professional in an increasingly computerised environment. Educational institutions should be equipped to provide this new basic training for modern life. Accordingly, computer labs are an essential medium for education in almost any field. Computer labs are one of the most popular IT infrastructures for technical training in primary and secondary schools, universities and other educational institutions all over the world. Unfortunately, a computer lab is expensive, in terms of both initial purchase and annual maintenance costs, and especially when we want to run the latest software. Hence, research efforts addressing computer lab efficiency, performance or cost reduction would have a worldwide repercussion. In response to this concern, this paper presents a survey on thin client technology for computer labs in educational environments. Besides setting out the advantages and drawbacks of this technology, we aim to refute false prejudices against thin clients, identifying a set of educational scenarios where thin clients are a better choice and others requiring traditional solutions

    Reducing power consumption of mobile thin client devices

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    Optimized mobile thin clients through a MPEG-4 BiFS semantic remote display framework

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    According to the thin client computing principle, the user interface is physically separated from the application logic. In practice only a viewer component is executed on the client device, rendering the display updates received from the distant application server and capturing the user interaction. Existing remote display frameworks are not optimized to encode the complex scenes of modern applications, which are composed of objects with very diverse graphical characteristics. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose to transfer to the client, in addition to the binary encoded objects, semantic information about the characteristics of each object. Through this semantic knowledge, the client is enabled to react autonomously on user input and does not have to wait for the display update from the server. Resulting in a reduction of the interaction latency and a mitigation of the bursty remote display traffic pattern, the presented framework is of particular interest in a wireless context, where the bandwidth is limited and expensive. In this paper, we describe a generic architecture of a semantic remote display framework. Furthermore, we have developed a prototype using the MPEG-4 Binary Format for Scenes to convey the semantic information to the client. We experimentally compare the bandwidth consumption of MPEG-4 BiFS with existing, non-semantic, remote display frameworks. In a text editing scenario, we realize an average reduction of 23% of the data peaks that are observed in remote display protocol traffic

    Towards a multimedia remote viewer for mobile thin clients

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    Be there a traditional mobile user wanting to connect to a remote multimedia server. In order to allow them to enjoy the same user experience remotely (play, interact, edit, store and share capabilities) as in a traditional fixed LAN environment, several dead-locks are to be dealt with: (1) a heavy and heterogeneous content should be sent through a bandwidth constrained network; (2) the displayed content should be of good quality; (3) user interaction should be processed in real-time and (4) the complexity of the practical solution should not exceed the features of the mobile client in terms of CPU, memory and battery. The present paper takes this challenge and presents a fully operational MPEG-4 BiFS solution

    Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

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    Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE

    TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2009

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    TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month
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