CWASI: A WebAssembly Runtime Shim for Inter-function Communication in the Serverless Edge-Cloud Continuum

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Marcelino, Cynthia, Nastic, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Marcelino, Cynthia
Nastic, Stefan
author_facet Marcelino, Cynthia
Nastic, Stefan
contents Serverless Computing brings advantages to the Edge-Cloud continuum, like simplified programming and infrastructure management. In composed workflows, where serverless functions need to exchange data constantly, serverless platforms rely on remote services such as object storage and key-value stores as a common approach to exchange data. In WebAssembly, functions leverage WebAssembly System Interface to connect to the network and exchange data via remote services. As a consequence, co-located serverless functions need remote services to exchange data, increasing latency and adding network overhead. To mitigate this problem, in this paper, we introduce CWASI: a WebAssembly OCI-compliant runtime shim that determines the best inter-function data exchange approach based on the serverless function locality. CWASI introduces a three-mode communication model for the Serverless Edge-Cloud continuum. This communication model enables CWASI Shim to optimize inter-function communication for co-located functions by leveraging the function host mechanisms. Experimental results show that CWASI reduces the communication latency between the co-located serverless functions by up to 95% and increases the communication throughput by up to 30x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_21503
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CWASI: A WebAssembly Runtime Shim for Inter-function Communication in the Serverless Edge-Cloud Continuum
Marcelino, Cynthia
Nastic, Stefan
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Serverless Computing brings advantages to the Edge-Cloud continuum, like simplified programming and infrastructure management. In composed workflows, where serverless functions need to exchange data constantly, serverless platforms rely on remote services such as object storage and key-value stores as a common approach to exchange data. In WebAssembly, functions leverage WebAssembly System Interface to connect to the network and exchange data via remote services. As a consequence, co-located serverless functions need remote services to exchange data, increasing latency and adding network overhead. To mitigate this problem, in this paper, we introduce CWASI: a WebAssembly OCI-compliant runtime shim that determines the best inter-function data exchange approach based on the serverless function locality. CWASI introduces a three-mode communication model for the Serverless Edge-Cloud continuum. This communication model enables CWASI Shim to optimize inter-function communication for co-located functions by leveraging the function host mechanisms. Experimental results show that CWASI reduces the communication latency between the co-located serverless functions by up to 95% and increases the communication throughput by up to 30x.
title CWASI: A WebAssembly Runtime Shim for Inter-function Communication in the Serverless Edge-Cloud Continuum
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21503