Measuring the Multimedia Performance of Server-Based Computing

The server-based computing (SBC) model is becoming an increasingly popular approach for delivering computational services with reduced administrative costs and better resource utilization. In this paper, we examine how effectively SBC architectures support multimedia applications. We focus on the effectiveness of the remote display protocol used in three popular SBC platforms for supporting video applications, Citrix Metaframe, Windows Terminal Server, and AT&T VNC. Our results show that SBC can be a viable approach for delivering VCR-quality video in LAN environments, but that existing solutions are inadequate at network access bandwidths found in broadband environments. Our results also show that SBC can deliver video with comparable network efficiency as streaming media solutions. We show that there is wide variation in the performance of the remote display technologies and discuss the factors that influence their performance.