Arena: a kubernetes-based testbed for evaluating application deployment across the computing continuum

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