Peek: A mobile-to-mobile remote computing protocol for smartphones and tablets

Abstract

A mobile-to-mobile remote computing protocol for smartphones presents a user with the ability to run an application remotely and to interact with it in a responsive way, where I/O updates can be performed midstream and the results can be viewed in real time. Even though several protocols exist for desktop remote computing, we argue that these cannot be applied as-is for mobile-to-mobile remote computing. In this context, we introduce Peek, a remote computing protocol with i) multi-touch support, ii) context association, and iii) multi-modal frame compression. Through implementation on real devices, we show that Peek reduces the time taken to perform actions on a server by 62% on average, compared to Virtual Network Computing (VNC). We also test Peek's multi-modal frame compression, against VNC, on datasets and show that it has the potential to reduce 30% of the bytes sent on the network.