Portable Desktop Applications Based on P2P Transportation and Virtualization.

Play-on-demand is usually regarded as a feasible access mode for web content (including streaming video, web pages and so on), web services and some Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) applications, but not for common desktop applications. This paper presents such a solution for Windows desktop-applications based on lightweight virtualization and network transportation technologies which allows a user to run her personalized software on any compatible computer across the Internet even though they do not exist on local disks of the host. In our approach, the user's data and their configurations are stored on a portable USB device. At run time, the desktop applications are downloaded from the Internet and run in a lightweight virtualization environment in which some resource-accessing APIs, such as registry, files/ directories, environment variables, and the like, are intercepted and redirected to the portable device or network as needed. Because applications are "played" without installation, like streaming media, they can be called "streaming software." Moreover, to protect software vendors' rights, access control technologies are used to block any illegal access. In the current implementation, P2P transportation is used as the transport method. However, our design actually does not rely on P2P, and another data delivery mechanism, like a dedicated file server, could be employed instead to make the system more predictable. This paper describes the design and technical details for this system, presents a demo application and evaluates it performance. The proposed solution is shown to be more efficient in performance and storage capacity than some of the existing solutions based on VM techniques.