USB/IP: a peripheral bus extension for device sharing over IP network
Takahiro Hirofuchi, Eiji Kawai, Kazutoshi Fujikawa, Hideki Sunahara · 2005
As personal computing becomes more popular and af-fordable, the availability of peripheral devices is also increasing rapidly. However, these peripheral devices can usually only be connected to a single machine at time. The ability to share peripheral devices between computers without any modification of existing com-puting environments is, consequently, a highly desir-able goal, as it improves the efficiency and usability of such devices. Existing device sharing technologies in the pervasive computing area are not sufficient for periph-eral devices designed for personal computers, because these technologies do not provide the degree of network-transparency necessary for both applications and device drivers. In this paper, we propose USB/IP as a peripheral bus extension over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. This novel device sharing approach is based on the sophis-ticated peripheral interfaces that are supported in most modern operating systems. Using a virtual peripheral bus driver, users can share a diverse range of devices over networks without any modification in existing op-erating systems and applications. Our experiments show that USB/IP has sufficient I/O performance for many USB devices, including isochronous ones. We also de-scribe performance optimization criteria that can be used to achieve further performance improvements. 1