Towards Enabling Residential Virtual-Desktop Computing

Commercial virtual-desktop computing is well established using computers optimized to serve as thin clients connected to centralized computing systems. Some common residential applications impose more stringent requirements on both communication bandwidth and latency than those of typical commercial applications. This article describes an objective study of residential applications accessed through thin-client virtual desktops for the purpose of investigating the feasibility of applying virtual-desktop computing to residential users. New metrics are introduced to quantify user-received application performance. The results suggest that certain commercial solutions with a commodity datacenter server show a strong potential for being adapted to residential virtual-desktop computing.