Improving Video Performance in VNC Under Latency Conditions

Virtual Network Computing, or VNC, is a popular thin client application used to access files and applications on remote computers. However, VNC can suffer from significant losses in throughput when there is high latency between the client and server. These losses become especially apparent in the case of video, where updates are both large and frequent. In this work, we present a Message Accelerator proxy for VNC. This simple but highly effective solution mitigates high latency network effects for video performance while maintaining the advantages of a client-pull system. By operating near/on the server, it can send updates to the client at a rate corresponding to proxy-server interactions which are faster than client-server interactions. When testing using video, our Message Accelerator design results in frame rates an order of magnitude higher than plain VNC when running under high latency conditions.