Introduction
How much bandwidth is required for a remote desktop? .. thats the question that always comes out when planning or thinking on Azure Virtual Desktop solution.
Bandwidth Requirement Remote Desktop Protocol [RDP]
and the answer is ? .. The short answer is depends. We should think of it as a presentation protocol that bandwidth consumption depends on what the user does, but we can use this table to get an idea, depending on the sizing workloads
| Light | 1.5 Mbps |
| Medium | 3 Mbps |
| Heavy | 5 Mbps |
| Power | 15 Mbps |
| About 1024 × 768 px | 1.5 Mbps |
| About 1280 × 720 px | 3 Mbps |
| About 1920 × 1080 px | 5 Mbps |
| About 3840 × 2160 px [4K] | 15 Mbps |
Use Cases and Bandwidth
| Idle | 0.3 Kbps | 0.3 Kbps | User paused, no sending or display transmission | |
| Microsoft Word | 100-150 Kbps | 200-300 Kbps | Actively working on Microsoft Word text input, copying and pasting graphics. | |
| Microsoft Excel | 150-200 Kbps | 400-500 Kbps | Using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, editing or moving through cells | |
| Microsoft PowerPoint | 4-4.5 Mbps | 1.6-1.8 Mbps | Using Microsoft PowerPoint, writing text copying images and transitioning screens | |
| Web Browsing | 6-6.5 Mbps | 0.9-1 Mbps | Use of graph and animations within a web browser. horizontal and vertical movement of the browser | |
| Image Gallery | 3.3-3.6 Mbps | 0.7-0.8 Mbps | Using image gallery, editing them | |
| Video playback | 8.5-9.5 Mbps | 2.5-2.8 Mbps | Video playback at 30 FPS half screen | |
| Fullscreen Video playback | 7.5-8.5 Mbps | 2.5-3.1 Mbps | 30 FPS full-screen video playback |
Considerations
To improve the experience, RDP uses different methods
- Frame rate optimization
- Content classification
- Application of Codec according to content
- Using customer cache
- Only screen changes are transmitted
- Rendering video content and similar RDP uses dynamic codecs to deliver content presentation
- Sessions in Idle, do not send traffic or is very minimal.
- When the RDP client is minimized, there is no sending of screen updates
- Latency with Azure, use the Windows Virtual Desktop Experience Estimator to validate
Summary
Keep these metrics in mind is super important when making a deployment, thinking mainly its public clouds.
One thing we need to cover in the future is the RDP optimization that we leave for later.