Rapid Just-in-time VM provisioning for cloud offload

Cloudlet is a small-scale cloud data center(DC) at the edge of Internet. It is aimed to support resource-intensive and interactive mobile applications by providing powerful computing resources to mobile devices with low latency. It is a new architectural element that extends todays cloud computing infrstructure acting as a middle tier of a 3-tier hierarchy: mobile device--cloudlet--cloud.
There are few differences between cloulets and the cloud.
Rapid Provisioning: The speed of provisioning matters for cloudlet. Todays Cloud Data Centers are optimized for launching VM images pointed by catalog like glance in OpensSack from the storage. In contrast cloudlet needs much more agility as users are mobile and need rapid provisioning using VM synthesis as well rapid hand off to next hop cloulet closer to moving device for reducing latency. We assume here the cloudlet register is available for selecting base disk image and provision the disk and memory binary delta to synthesize new VM and let cloudlet client on mobile help create seamless experience for the application user. Please refer to details specs in the link above.