Open Access
Protocol-agnostic method for monitoring interactivity time in remote desktop services
(Springer Nature, 2021-02-24) Arellano Usón, Jesús; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoa eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritza; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC
The growing trend of desktop virtualisation has facilitated the reduction of management costs associated with traditional systems and access to services from devices with different capabilities. However, desktop virtualisation requires controlling the interactivity provided by an infrastructure and the quality of experience perceived by users. This paper proposes a methodology for the quantification of interactivity based on the measurement of the time elapsed between user interactions and the associated responses. Measurement error is controlled using a novel mechanism for the detection of screen changes, which can lead to erroneous measurements. Finally, a campus virtual desktop infrastructure and the Amazon WorkSpaces solution are analysed using this proposed methodology. The results demonstrate the importance of the location of virtualisation infrastructure and the types of protocols used by remote desktop services.
Open Access
Survey on quality of experience evaluation for cloud-based interactive applications
(MDPI, 2024) Arellano Usón, Jesús; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoa eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritza; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC
A cloud-based interactive application (CIA) is an application running in the cloud with stringent interactivity requirements, such as remote desktop and cloud gaming. These services have experienced a surge in usage, primarily due to the adoption of new remote work practices during the pandemic and the emergence of entertainment schemes similar to cloud gaming platforms. Evaluating the quality of experience (QoE) in these applications requires specific metrics, including interactivity time, responsiveness, and the assessment of video- and audio-quality degradation. Despite existing studies that evaluate QoE and compare features of general cloud applications, systematic research into QoE for CIAs is lacking. Previous surveys often narrow their focus, overlooking a comprehensive assessment. They touch on QoE in broader contexts but fall short in detailed metric analysis. Some emphasise areas like mobile cloud computing, omitting CIA-specific nuances. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of QoE measurement techniques in CIAs, providing a taxonomy of input metrics, strategies, and evaluation architectures. State-of-the-art proposals are assessed, enabling a comparative analysis of their strengths and weaknesses and identifying future research directions.
Open Access
Evaluation of RTT as an estimation of interactivity time for QoE evaluation in remote desktop environments
(IEEE, 2023) Arellano Usón, Jesús; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoa eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritza
In recent years, there has been a notable surge in the utilization of remote desktop services, largely driven by the emergence of new remote work models introduced during the pandemic. Traditional evaluation of the quality of experience (QoE) of users in remote desktop environments has relied on measures such as round-trip time (RTT). However, these measures are insufficient to capture all the factors that influence QoE. This study evaluated RTT and interactivity time in an enterprise environment over a period of 6 months and analysed the suitability of using RTT drawing previously unexplored connections between RTT, interactivity, and QoE. The results indicate that RTT is an insufficient indicator of QoE in productive environments with low RTT values. We outline some precise measures of interactivity needed to capture all the factors that contribute to QoE in remote desktop environments.
Open Access
Interactivity anomaly detection in remote work scenarios using LTSM
(IEEE, 2024) Arellano Usón, Jesús; Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Morató Osés, Daniel; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoa eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritza; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC
In recent years, there has been a notable surge in the utilization of remote desktop services, largely driven by the emergence of new remote work models introduced during the pandemic. These services cater to interactive cloud-based applications (CIAs), whose core functionality operates in the cloud, demanding strict end-user interactivity requirements. This boom has led to a significant increase in their deployment, accompanied by a corresponding increase in associated maintenance costs. Service administrators aim to guarantee a satisfactory Quality of Experience (QoE) by monitoring metrics like interactivity time, particularly in cloud environments where variables such as network performance and shared resources come into play. This paper analyses anomaly detection state of the art and proposes a novel system for detecting interactivity time anomalies in cloud-based remote desktop environments. We employ an automatic model based on LSTM neural networks that achieves an accuracy of up to 99.97%.
Open Access
Remote access protocols for Desktop-as-a-Service solutions
(Public Library of Science, 2019) Magaña Lizarrondo, Eduardo; Sesma Gracia, Iris; Morató Osés, Daniel; Izal Azcárate, Mikel; Ingeniaritza Elektrikoa, Elektronikoaren eta Telekomunikazio Ingeniaritzaren; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Comunicación
The use of remote desktop services on virtualized machines is a general trend to reduce the cost of desktop seats. Instead of assigning a physical machine with its operating system and software to each user, it is considerably easier to manage a light client machine that connects to a server where the instance of the user’s desktop machine actually executes. Citrix and VMware have been major suppliers of these systems in private clouds. Desktop-as-a-Service solutions such as Amazon WorkSpaces offer a similar functionality, yet in a public cloud environment. In this paper, we review the main offerings of remote desktop protocols for a cloud deployment. We evaluate the necessary network resources using a traffic model based on self-similar processes. We also evaluate the quality of experience perceived by the user, in terms of image quality and interactivity, providing values of Mean Opinion Score (MOS). The results confirm that the type of application running on the remote servers and the mix of users must be considered to determine the bandwidth requirements. Applications such as web browsing result in unexpectedly high traffic rates and long bursts, more than the case of desktop video playing, because the on-page animations are rendered on the server.