Management of Pervasive Displays

Traditional signage is being replaced by digital displays that are directly connected to the Internet and show content from the cloud. These displays increasingly rely on a standard web-browser and HTML5 technologies for rendering rich media content. As the number of these displays increase, it is critical to provide user-friendly and efficient solutions for managing them remotely from the cloud. The remote management of such displays traditionally relies on proprietary native software solutions that employ remote desktop access technologies such as Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). However, these solutions are not only resource-intensive in terms of the consumed bandwidth, but also cumbersome to use on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In this thesis, we design a new remote-management solution that relies on available web technologies including HTML5, WebRTC and WebSocket. In particular, we use the WebSocket protocol and a Publish/Subscribe communication pattern for our proposed solution. To demonstrate the feasibility of this remote-management solution, we implement a proof-of-concept HTML5-based application for a representative digital signage scenario. Three different versions are implemented and realized on top of state-of-the-art JavaScript libraries, namely mutation-summary, sharejs, and socket.io. The performance of these solutions is evaluated in terms of payload, round trip time, throughput, and application response time. The obtained results show that mutation summary has low latency and is best suited for non-interactive content. ShareJS and Socketio are more suitable for real-time collaborative applications. Lastly, we also analyze the libraries from a programmer’s perspective and present important implementation related considerations