Towards collaborative MPEG-4 BiFS mobile thin remote viewer

The proof of concepts (PoC) for MPEG-4 BiFS & LASeR mobile thin remote viewer has been already obtained. The present paper goes one step further, from PoC towards applications supporting multiuser collaboration in virtual environments. In this respect, the previous architecture is reconsidered and enriched with new components. This way, significant gains with respect to competitor remote viewer solutions (HEXTILE optimised VNC) are obtained. First, by empowering the basic BiFS mechanisms with lossy and lossless compression, the downlink bandwidth consumption is reduced by an average factor of 2. Secondly, by introducing a new architectural component (Interaction Manager), the uplink consumption corresponding to the user interaction is reduced by an average factor of 10, while the roundtrip network time copes with the real time requirements (lower than 30 ms in Wi-Fi setups). Finally, the CPU consumption is reduced by an average factor of 6. The above-mentioned quantitative results correspond to two use cases, namely text editing (gEdit) and www browsing (Epiphany).