ShAppliT: A Novel Broker-mediated Solution to Generic Application Sharing in a Cluster of Closed Operating Systems

With advances in hardware and networking technologies and mass manufacturing, the cost of high end hardware had fall dramatically in recent years. However, software cost still remains high and is the dominant fraction of the overall computing budget. Application sharing is a promising solution to reduce the overall IT cost. Currently software licenses are still based on the number of copies installed. An organization can thus reduce the IT cost if the users are able to remotely access the software that is installed on certain computer servers instead of running the software on every local computer. In this paper, we propose a generic application sharing architecture for users’ application sharing in a cluster of closed operating systems such as Microsoft Windows. We also propose a broker-mediated solution where we allow multiple users to access a single user software license on a time multiplex basis through a single logged in user. An application sharing tool called ShAppliT has been introduced and implemented in Microsoft Windows operating system. We evaluated their performance on CPU usage and memory consumption when a computer is hosting multiple concurrent shared application sessions.