Network latency hiding in thin client systems through server-centric speculative display updating

The widespread availability of cloud computing services has revitalized interest in the thin client computing paradigm, in which application logic is executing on a remote server, typically hosted in a cloud computing infrastructure. The user interacts with a local viewer, that forwards the user events over the network to the server and accepts the returned graphical updates. An important challenge for this approach consists of the fact that at least one network round-trip time is required to present the application output that results from the user’s actions. In this paper a novel speculative display update mechanism is proposed to hide the network latency from the user by speculatively updating the screen without awaiting the server response. The mechanism relies on online server side profiling of the graphical output caused by user events, based on which a finite-state model is constructed capturing the graphical behaviour of the application. Experiments with a text editor show that, once the application model is learned, speculative responses are displayed within 40 ms for over 80% of the user events, with an accuracy exceeding 70%.