Performance evaluation of remote display access for mobile cloud computing

Mobile applications are increasingly exploiting cloud computing to overcome the resource limitations of mobile devices. To this end, the most computationally expensive tasks are offloaded to the cloud and the mobile application simply interacts with a remote service through a network connection. One way to establish such a connection is given by remote display access, in which a mobile device just operates as a thin client by relaying the input events to a server and updating the screen based on the content received. In this article, we specifically address remote display access as a means for mobile cloud computing, with focus on its power consumption at mobile devices. Different from most of the existing literature, we take an experimental approach based on real user sessions employing different remote access protocols and types of applications, including gaming. Through several experiments, we characterize the impact of the different protocols and their features on power consumption and network utilization. We conclude our analysis with considerations on usability and user experience.