vMobiDesk: Desktop Virtualization for Mobile Operating Systems

Smart mobile devices have significantly increased the popularity of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) at work, as they benefit people’s daily lives. However, BYOD comes with several challenging issues such as limited hardware capacity, frequent upgrades of applications, and security and privacy concerns. Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI), a general framework that provides more reliable and secure solution for BYOD, has therefore been proposed. The key of VMI is to host a mobile Operating System (OS) on a remote cloud data center, and run mobile applications on it. However, VMI faces performance challenge as it needs to display the entire virtualized desktop on a mobile device while the real content of the desktop is on a remote server. To address the performance challenge, we design and implement a VMI named vMobiDesk on top of Android with optimized network transfer mechanisms and display virtualization. In particular, vMobiDesk focuses on virtualizing the display of Android desktops, redirecting users’ input events, providing audio support and remote camera. The experimental results show that vMobiDesk has low virtualization overhead, as well as enables mobile users to obtain good experiences with BYOD applications.