Under the framework of the FP-7 European MobiThin project, the present study addresses the issue of remote display representation for mobile thin client. The main issue is to design a compressing algorithm for heterogeneous content (text, graphics, image and video) with low-complex decoding. As a first step in this direction, we propose a novel software architecture, based on BiFS -Binary Format for Scenes (MPEG-4 Part 11). On the server side, the graphical content is parsed, converted and binary encoded into the BiFS format. This content is then streamed to the terminal, where it is played on a simple MPEG player. The viability of this solution is validated by comparing it to the most intensively used wired solutions, e.g. VNC -Virtual Network Computing.

Be there a traditional mobile user wanting to connect to a remote multimedia server. In order to allow them to enjoy the same user experience remotely (play, interact, edit, store and share capabilities) as in a traditional fixed LAN environment, several dead-locks are to be dealt with: (1) a heavy and heterogeneous content should be sent through a bandwidth constrained network; (2) the displayed content should be of good quality; (3) user interaction should be processed in real-time and (4) the complexity of the practical solution should not exceed the features of the mobile client in terms of CPU, memory and battery. The present paper takes this challenge and presents a fully operational MPEG-4 BiFS solution.