SunFlight Desktop Mobility Framework:
Bringing your environment to you wherever you may be.

True mobility requires access to all of your resources and applications from any connected location. It can be achieved by literally transporting your desktop from one place to another. This also has the side-effect of environment persistence where screen and compute state continue to evolve even when changing from one remote location to another. It is desirable to do this over the internet, however, such a network presents a dynamically changing environment for both bandwidth and latency. In addition, modern desktops contain a large number of changing color images which must be efficiently compressed to achieve a useful user experience.

We are investigating a solution that works with standard, lower bandwidth, wide-area networks in order to enable remote access over preexisting wired or wireless connections. This is done using a novel collection of image codecs coupled with update compression, adaptive frame rates, encryption technology and bandwidth / latency feedback. We have prototypes which run on common platforms and on a few PDA's as well.

The SunFlight project and the SunFlight desktop mobility framework provide a way to access the resources of a larger computing infrastructure from a remote location. This system is designed to be secure, minimize bandwidth usage and dynamically adapt to changing network conditions. The project is also exploring how this technology can use physical location information to track session locations and how desktops can be used to create large shared workspaces for collaboration.