Quality of experience in remote virtual desktop services

Remote Virtual Desktop (RVD) services provide flexible and cost-effective means to deliver virtual PCs to endusers. RVD services have been traditionally deployed in enterprise LAN scenarios, where network performance is optimal and the Quality of Experience (QoE) undergone by its users is generally not an issue. However, the need for mobility of RVD users (e.g., remote office, home office, etc.) and the explosion of Cloud-based services have pushed RVD to WAN scenarios, and nowadays it is common to find RVD services running at large datacenters in the Cloud. In such a context, network delay and bandwidth are very dynamic and difficult to guarantee or even to control, and QoE becomes a real bottleneck. In this paper we present a complete study of the QoE undergone by 52 RVD users in controlled subjective lab tests. The study is performed on a dedicated RVD testbed based on Citrix technology, which is the de-facto RVD solution used in enterprise scenarios. The study permits to better understand the interplays between network performance (i.e., network delay and bandwidth) and QoE in RVD services. In addition, it provides interesting results on the behavior of RVD users when confronted to variable network conditions w.r.t. their behavior on standard local desktops.