A Generic Arrival Process Model for Generating Hybrid Cloud Workload

In cloud computing, the arrival process of user requests is becoming more diversiform with the globalization of users and the popularization of mobile technology. Moreover, the workloads in cloud computing are tending towards a hybrid of more applications types. It is hardly for the traditional arrival process models to cover the ever-increasing new arrival processes in reality. For that, we propose a general and flexible arrival process model to describe various arrival processes. At the same time, we present a unified generation algorithm to generate the corresponding workload arrival instance based on the arrival process model automatically. The model defines the arrival process by four steps: firstly defines the number of intervals during the workload lifetime, then defines the length of each time interval, next defines the number of requests arriving during each time interval, lastly defines the arrival time points during each time interval. In the case study, we use the generic arrival process model to describe three arrival process models of typical cloud application types and a custom arrival process model, and present corresponding arrival instances using the generation algorithm. The cases showed the flexibility and extensibility of the model. The model and algorithm are simple and generic and are more approaching to realistic hybrid arrival processes.