A Hybrid Thin-Client Protocol for Multimedia Streaming and Interactive Gaming Applications

Despite the growing popularity and advantages of thin-client systems, they still have some important shortcomings. Current thin-client systems are ideally suited to be used with classic office-applications but as soon as multimedia and 3D gaming applications are used they require a large amount of bandwidth and processing power. Furthermore, most of these applications heavily rely on the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). Due to the architectural design of thin-client systems, they cannot profit from the GPU resulting in slow performance and bad image quality. This paper proposes a thin-client system which addresses these problems: the paper introduces a realtime desktopstreamer using a videocodec to stream the graphical output of applications after GPU-processing to a thin-client device, capable of decoding a videostream.