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Cloud offload is an important technique in mobile computing. VM-based cloudlets have been proposed as offload sites for the resource-intensive and latency-sensitive computations typically associated with mobile multimedia applications. Since cloud offload relies on precisely-configured back-end software, it is difficult to support at global scale across cloudlets in multiple domains. To address this problem, we describe just-in-time (JIT) provisioning of cloudlets under the control of an associated mobile device. Using a suite of five representative mobile applications, we demonstrate a prototype system that is capable of provisioning a cloudlet with a non-trivial VM image in 10 seconds. This speed is achieved through dynamic VM synthesis and a series of optimizations to aggressively reduce transfer costs and startup latency.
Ha et al. (2013) studied this question.