Keith Winstein, Hari Balakrishnan
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, MA, June 2012
Mosh (mobile shell) is a remote terminal application that
supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and
speculatively and safely echoes user keystrokes for better
interactive response over high-latency paths. Mosh is built on the
State Synchronization Protocol (SSP), a new UDP-based protocol that
securely synchronizes client and server state, even across changes
of the client's IP address. Mosh uses SSP to
synchronize a character-cell terminal emulator, maintaining terminal
state at both client and server to predictively echo keystrokes.
Our evaluation analyzed keystroke traces from six different users
covering a period of 40 hours of real-world usage. Mosh was able to
immediately display the effects of 70% of the user keystrokes. Over
a commercial EV-DO (3G) network, median keystroke response latency
with Mosh was less than 5 ms, compared with 503 ms for SSH. Mosh is free
software, available from here. It was
downloaded more than 15,000 times in the first week of its release.
[PDF (169KB)]
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{winstein2012mosh,
author = "Keith Winstein and Hari Balakrishnan",
title = "{Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients}",
booktitle = {USENIX Annual Technical Conference},
year = {2012},
month = {June},
address = {Boston, MA}
}