VM synthesis is our technique to speed up VM provisioning from Cloud
to Cloudlet. The idea behind is to divide a custom VM into two parts;
Base VM and VM overlay. Base VM is a vanilla OS that will be used as a
golden image such as newly installed Windows OS or Ubuntu OS
(conceptually similar to Amazon Machine Images). VM overlay is a
binary delta that contains user-customized part. For example, if a VM
is running a face recognition server on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, all the bits
related to the installation of the face recognition server will be
encapsulated into a VM overlay and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will be a base VM.
