cloudlet
A cloudlet refers to a small-scale data center or a cluster of computers designed to provide cloud computing services to mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices, within close geographical proximity. The primary goal of a cloudlet is to enhance the response time of applications running on these mobile devices by offering low latency, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity. This is achieved by physically hosting cloud computing resources, like virtual machines, closer to the mobile devices that access them, thereby reducing the latency delays often encountered in traditional cloud computing models[3].
Cloudlets act as a middle tier in a 3-tier hierarchy that includes the mobile device, the cloudlet, and the cloud. This architecture aims to bring the cloud closer to the user by acting as a “data center in a box.” The concept of cloudlets was first introduced by researchers M. Satyanarayanan, Victor Bahl, Ramón Cáceres, and Nigel Davies, with a prototype developed by Carnegie Mellon University as part of a research project[4].
The motivation behind cloudlets is to support resource-intensive and interactive mobile applications by providing powerful computing resources at the edge of the internet. This is particularly important for applications that require real-time processing and cannot tolerate the high latencies associated with centralized cloud data centers. Examples of such applications include speech recognition, language processing, machine learning, and virtual reality[3][4].
Citations:
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cloudlet
[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cloudlet
[3] https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/cloudlet
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudlet
[5] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cloudlets
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/cloudlet
[7] https://www.yourdictionary.com/cloudlet
[8] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cloudlet
[9] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~satya/docdir/satya-ieeepvc-cloudlets-2009.pdf