Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) has been recognized as an elastic and economical solution that enables users to access personal desktops from anywhere at any time. During the interaction process of DaaS, users rely on screen updates to perceive execution results remotely, and thus the reliability and timeliness of screen updates transmission have a great influence on users’ quality of experience (QoE). However, the efficient transmission of screen updates in DaaS is facing severe challenges: most transmission schemes applied in DaaS determine sending strategies in terms of pre-set rules, lacking the intelligence to utilize bandwidth rationally and fit new network scenarios. Meanwhile, they tend to focus on reliability or timeliness and perform unsatisfactorily in ensuring reliability and timeliness simultaneously, leading to lower transmission efficiency of screen updates and users’ QoE when network conditions turn unfavorable. In this article, an intelligent and reliable end-to-end transmission scheme (IRTS) is proposed to cope with the preceding issues. IRTS draws support from reinforcement learning by adopting SARSA, an online learning method based on the temporal difference update rule, to grasp the optimal mapping between network states and sending actions, which extricates IRTS from the reliance on pre-set rules and augments its adaptability to different network conditions. Moreover, IRTS guarantees reliability and timeliness via an adaptive loss recovery method, which intends to recover lost screen updates data automatically with fountain code while controlling the number of redundant packets generated. Extensive performance evaluations are conducted, and numerical results show that IRTS outperforms the reference schemes in display quality, end-to-end delay/delay jitter, and fairness when transferring screen updates under various network conditions, proving that IRTS can enhance the transmission efficiency of screen updates and users’ QoE in DaaS.
