IoT Workload Emulation for Data Centers

The Internet of Things (IoT) domain has been one of the fastest growing areas in the computer industry for the last few years. Consequently, IoT applications are becoming the dominant work load for many data centers. This has implications for the designers of data centers, as they need to meet their customers' requirements. Since it is not easy to use real applications for the design and test of data center setups, a tool is required to emulate real applications but is easy to configure, scale and deploy in a data center. This paper will introduce a simple but generic way to model the work load of typical IoT applications, in order to have a realistic and reproducible way to emulate IT loads for data centers. IoT application designers are in the process of harmonizing their approaches on how architectures should look, which building blocks are needed, and how they should interwork. While all IoT subdomains are diverse when it comes to the details, the architectural blueprints are becoming more and more aligned. These blueprints are called reference architectures and incorporate similar patterns for the underlying application primitives. This paper will introduce an approach to decompose IoT applications into such application primitives, and use them to emulate a workload as it would be created by the modeled application. The paper concludes with an example application of the IoT Workload Emulation in the BodenTypeDC experiment, where new cooling approaches for data centers have been tested under realistic work load conditions.