BURSE: A bursty and self-similar workload generator for cloud computing

As two of the most important characteristics of workloads, burstiness and self-similarity are gaining more and more attention. Workload generation, which is a key technique for performance analysis and simulations, has also attracted an increasing interest in cloud community in recent years. Though a large number of methods for synthetically generating bursty or self-similar workloads have been proposed in the literature, none of them can deal with workload generation with both of the two characteristics. In this paper, a configurable and intelligible synthetic generator (BURSE) is proposed for bursty and self-similar workloads in cloud computing based on a superposition of two-state Markov Modulated Poisson Processes (MMPP2s). The proposed generator can produce workloads with both specified intension of burstiness and self-similarity. Detailed experimental evaluation demonstrates the accuracy, robustness and good applicability of BURSE.