Novel lightweight multicasting protocol for thin-client systems
Fuad Shamieh, Xianbin Wang · 2016
Thin-client computing is being adopted by many industries to bring services to users through a unique platform over wide area networks (WAN). To improve thin-client communication sessions, some authors have proposed using the thin-client protocol with enhanced image compression techniques while others have proposed using drawing commands instead. To take full advantage of the capabilities of thin-client systems, an advance communication protocol is needed. In this paper, a lightweight multicasting protocol for thin-client systems, Thin- Cast, is proposed where the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by a user are maintained while meeting the latency constraints. ThinCast establishes a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network using the underlying Internet protocol (IP) infrastructure. A central server explicitly requests a peer to forward a payload to a list of defined neighboring peers. While using ThinCast, server costs are reduced since the required throughput to achieve the same quality of service is lowered. On average, the throughput decreased by 11% under different simulation scenarios. The decrease in throughput values allows the server to temporarily increase the packet generation rate, thereby increasing the quality of the received video by the users.