Thin Client Computing Solutions in Low- and High-Motion Scenarios

The centralized thin client computing environment offers a solution to the vulnerability of desktops to viruses, trojan horses and worms. It also releases the user from regular software and hardware updates. One of the major barriers for the proliferation of thin clients in public wide-area networks is the hampering presentation of multimedia applications. While the existing remote display protocols offer a good user experience for office applications, most protocols cannot deal with swift display updates, like video playback, or hardware-accelerated 3D-graphics as in games. In this paper, a wide range of well-known and widely used thin client protocols are tested in both low-motion and high-motion scenarios. It is shown that additional functionality is required to offer a satisfying multimedia experience.