Desktop Sharing Portal

Desktop sharing technologies have existed since the late 80s. It is often used in scenarios where collaborative computing is beneficial to participants in the shared environment by the control of the more knowledgeable party. But the steps required in establishing a session is often cumbersome to many. Selection of a sharing method, obtaining sharing target’s network address, sharing tool’s desired ports, and firewall issues are major hurdles for a typical non-IT user. In this project, I have constructed a web-portal that helps collaborators to easily locate each other and initialize sharing sessions. The portal that I developed enables collaborated sessions to start as easily as browsing to a URL of the sharing service provider, with no need to download or follow installation instructions on either party’s end. In addition, I have added video conferencing and audio streaming capability to bring better collaborative and multimedia experience

Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

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

THINC: A Remote Display Architecture for Thin-Client Computing

Rapid improvements in network bandwidth, cost, and ubiquity combined with the security hazards and high total cost of ownership of personal computers have created a growing market for thin-client computing. We introduce THINC, a remote display system architecture for high-performance thin-client computing in both LAN and WAN environments. THINC transparently maps high-level application display calls to a few simple low-level commands which can be implemented easily and efficiently. THINC introduces a number of novel latency-sensitive optimization techniques, including offscreen drawing awareness, command buffering and scheduling, non-blocking display operation, native video support, and server-side screen scaling. We have implemented THINC in an XFree86/Linux environment and compared its performance with other popular approaches, including Citrix MetaFrame, Microsoft Terminal Services, SunRay, VNC, and X. Our experimental results on web and video applications demonstrate that THINC can be as much as five times faster than traditional thin-client systems in high latency network environments and is capable of playing full-screen video at full frame rate

REMOTE MOBILE SCREEN (RMS): AN APPROACH FOR SECURE BYOD ENVIRONMENTS

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a policy where employees use their own personal mobile devices to perform work-related tasks. Enterprises reduce their costs since they do not have to purchase and provide support for the mobile devices. BYOD increases job satisfaction and productivity in the employees, as they can choose which device to use and do not need to carry two or more devices. However, BYOD policies create an insecure environment, as the corporate network is extended and it becomes harder to protect it from attacks. In this scenario, the corporate information can be leaked, personal and corporate spaces are not separated, it becomes difficult to enforce security policies on the devices, and employees are worried about their privacy. Consequently, a secure BYOD environment must achieve the following goals: space isolation, corporate data protection, security policy enforcement, true space isolation, non-intrusiveness, and low resource consumption. We found that none of the currently available solutions achieve all of these goals. We developed Remote Mobile Screen (RMS), a framework that meets all the goals for a secure BYOD environment. To achieve this, the enterprise provides the employee with a Virtual Machine (VM) running a mobile operating system, which is located in the enterprise network and to which the employee connects using the mobile device. We provide an implementation of RMS using commonly available software for an x86 architecture. We address RMS challenges related to compatibility, scalability and latency. For the first challenge, we show that at least 90.2% of the productivity applications from Google Play can be installed on an x86 architecture, while at least 80.4% run normally. For the second challenge, we deployed our implementation on a high-performance server and run up to 596 VMs using 256 GB of RAM. Further, we show that the number of VMs is proportional to the available RAM. For the third challenge, we used our implementation on GENI and conclude that an application latency of 150 milliseconds can be achieved. Adviser: Byrav Ramamurth

Elastic Resource Management in Distributed Clouds

The ubiquitous nature of computing devices and their increasing reliance on remote resources have driven and shaped public cloud platforms into unprecedented large-scale, distributed data centers. Concurrently, a plethora of cloud-based applications are experiencing multi-dimensional workload dynamics---workload volumes that vary along both time and space axes and with higher frequency. The interplay of diverse workload characteristics and distributed clouds raises several key challenges for efficiently and dynamically managing server resources. First, current cloud platforms impose certain restrictions that might hinder some resource management tasks. Second, an application-agnostic approach might not entail appropriate performance goals, therefore, requires numerous specific methods. Third, provisioning resources outside LAN boundary might incur huge delay which would impact the desired agility. In this dissertation, I investigate the above challenges and present the design of automated systems that manage resources for various applications in distributed clouds. The intermediate goal of these automated systems is to fully exploit potential benefits such as reduced network latency offered by increasingly distributed server resources. The ultimate goal is to improve end-to-end user response time with novel resource management approaches, within a certain cost budget. Centered around these two goals, I first investigate how to optimize the location and performance of virtual machines in distributed clouds. I use virtual desktops, mostly serving a single user, as an example use case for developing a black-box approach that ranks virtual machines based on their dynamic latency requirements. Those with high latency sensitivities have a higher priority of being placed or migrated to a cloud location closest to their users. Next, I relax the assumption of well-provisioned virtual machines and look at how to provision enough resources for applications that exhibit both temporal and spatial workload fluctuations. I propose an application-agnostic queueing model that captures the resource utilization and server response time. Building upon this model, I present a geo-elastic provisioning approach---referred as geo-elasticity---for replicable multi-tier applications that can spin up an appropriate amount of server resources in any cloud locations. Last, I explore the benefits of providing geo-elasticity for database clouds, a popular platform for hosting application backends. Performing geo-elastic provisioning for backend database servers entails several challenges that are specific to database workload, and therefore requires tailored solutions. In addition, cloud platforms offer resources at various prices for different locations. Towards this end, I propose a cost-aware geo-elasticity that combines a regression-based workload model and a queueing network capacity model for database clouds. In summary, hosting a diverse set of applications in an increasingly distributed cloud makes it interesting and necessary to develop new, efficient and dynamic resource management approaches

A survey on vehicular communication for cooperative truck platooning application

Platooning is an application where a group of vehicles move one after each other in close proximity, acting jointly as a single physical system. The scope of platooning is to improve safety, reduce fuel consumption, and increase road use efficiency. Even if conceived several decades ago as a concept, based on the new progress in automation and vehicular networking platooning has attracted particular attention in the latest years and is expected to become of common implementation in the next future, at least for trucks.The platoon system is the result of a combination of multiple disciplines, from transportation, to automation, to electronics, to telecommunications. In this survey, we consider the platooning, and more specifically the platooning of trucks, from the point of view of wireless communications. Wireless communications are indeed a key element, since they allow the information to propagate within the convoy with an almost negligible delay and really making all vehicles acting as one. Scope of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey on connected vehicles for the platooning application, starting with an overview of the projects that are driving the development of this technology, followed by a brief overview of the current and upcoming vehicular networking architecture and standards, by a review of the main open issues related to wireless communications applied to platooning, and a discussion of security threats and privacy concerns. The survey will conclude with a discussion of the main areas that we consider still open and that can drive future research directions.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Optimization methods for the performance enhancement of thin client computing over bandwidth-limited and slow links

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH