Research And Optimazation On SPICE Desktop Protocol

Cloud computing is leading the development of the virtualization technologies, and desktop virtualization is an important component of virtualization technologies. With the virtualized desktop, users can get almost the same experience as operating in physical PC. For administers, it’s easy to manage thousands of “PCs” and it also reduces the costs of hardware, etc. But because of the limits of bandwidth of network and hardware,it will take a long time for the desktop virtualization to be widely used.Nowadays, there are many desktop virtualization protocols, and the SPICE(Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) is a very popular one developed by Red Hat company which is published as an open source software under GPLv2. The communication between client and server of SPICE is proceeded through mutiple independent channels which is friendly for us to modify the code based on a specific situation.A lot of research is done on the SPICE protocol, and apply several improvements based on some scenes, the main contents are as follows:1.Based on a further research of the main desktop virtualization protocols, the key technologies of virtualization protocols are confirmed.2.For the limits of network bandwidth and hardware, an independent sinner channel between the client and server of SPICE is built which collects client hardware information and network status in real-time. Then the server evaluates the information from the channel and chooses a property method for transferring desktop images and videos.3.The desktop sometimes is dead during paying videos and multiple photos, the problem is solved with the three following methods:(a) A method is proposed to detect the video area and then transfer the video with lossy compression and dropping frames.(b) Analyse the differences between natural images and desktop images, to transfer desktop effectively, it divides the image to many tiny images, then apply different compression algorithms on the different tiny images.(c) Because of the updating of desktop is usually on a tiny area, a cache system is built for both client and server, it really decreases a lot of bandwidth.4.Not like physical desktop, it’s difficult to test virtualized desktop. An efficient method is propose based on slow-motion to test our optimized SPICE protocol.Tests show that the optimization based on SPICE protocol makes the virtual desktop performance greatly improved. It saves bandwidth up to 50% in video scenes and about20% in normal scenes. In the meanwhile, it makes virtual desktop work in poor network conditions more smoothly.