Arena: A Kubernetes-based Testbed for Evaluating Application Deployment across the Computing Continuum

Abstract

This paper introduces Arena, a Kubernetes-based testbed for evaluating application deployment across computing continuum environments (IoT/Edge/Cloud). Arena enables the emulation of diverse computing nodes using Docker containers and leverages Kubernetes for testbed management. Arena integrates the Chaos Mesh framework to simulate network characteristics and Prometheus with Grafana tools for monitoring and visualization purposes. Experiments on the Grid'5000 platform with a Google microservice application demonstrate that Arena’s container-based emulation achieves similar resource usage patterns to virtual machine-based nodes, and its network chaos injection effectively enforces network constraints. Results highlight Arena’s capability to provide a practical and reproducible environment for testing containerized applications across diverse computing continuum nodes.