Hybrid WebAssembly-Container Orchestration in Embedded Heterogeneous Scenarios

In edge computing for the Internet of Things (IoT), embedded devices face performance bottlenecks from hardware heterogeneity and resource constraints, challenging traditional container technologies in real-time processing. This paper proposes an architecture-aware orchestration framework based on the lightweight Kubernetes distribution k3s, integrating the WebAssembly Micro Runtime (WAMR) as the execution environment. The framework seamlessly combines traditional containers and WebAssembly (Wasm) containers. A tailored containerd-shim interface enables unified scheduling and management of Wasm containers, while Open Container Initiative (OCI) image parsing allows direct extraction and loading of Wasm modules from standard container images. Leveraging an architecture-aware scheduling strategy, the framework optimizes resource allocation, reducing memory and CPU overhead while improving startup latency and storage efficiency. This study lays a practical foundation for efficient, low-latency IoT applications.