WoW-IO: a Gaming-Based Storage Trace Generator for Edge Computing

Workload traces play a crucial role in the design and evaluation of storage systems. They are used for evaluating system performance and optimizing aspects such as data access speeds, energy consumption, and load balancing. Most publicly available traces were collected in cloud environments, which limits their ability to represent workloads in user-centric and highly disaggregated settings such as edge systems.In this paper, we present WoW-IO, an open-source object trace generator based on the popular video game ‘World of Warcraft’. WoW-IO uses, as input, logs of in-game avatar information from the game’s servers. We describe the principles and assumptions used in the design of WoW-IO, how the generated traces can be used to evaluate various aspects of an edge storage-system design, and how the trace format can be extended to reflect additional details and complex usage scenarios.