On the Performance Comparisons of Native and Clientless Real-Time Screen-Sharing Technologies

Real-time screen-sharing provides users with ubiquitous access to remote applications, such as computer games, movie players, and desktop applications (apps), anywhere and anytime. In this article, we study the performance of different screen-sharing technologies, which can be classified into native and clientless ones. The native ones dictate that users install special-purpose software, while the clientless ones directly run in web browsers. In particular, we conduct extensive experiments in three steps. First, we identify a suite of the most representative native and clientless screen-sharing technologies. Second, we propose a systematic measurement methodology for comparing screen-sharing technologies under diverse and dynamic network conditions using different performance metrics. Last, we conduct extensive experiments and perform in-depth analysis to quantify the performance gap between clientless and native screen-sharing technologies. We found that our WebRTC-based implementation achieves the best overall performance. More precisely, it consumes a maximum of 3 Mbps bandwidth while reaching a high decoding ratio and delivering good video quality. Moreover, it leads to a steadily high decoding ratio and video quality under dynamic network conditions. By presenting the very first rigorous comparisons of the native and clientless screen-sharing technologies, this article will stimulate more exciting studies on the emerging clientless screen-sharing technologies.