Achieving Fast and High Throughput Data Exchange for Serverless Computing Systems Via Switch-Native Serialization/Deserialization

Serverless computing has emerged as a dominant cloud paradigm that enhances development efficiency and reduces operational costs. Serialization and deserialization are key operations in these systems. However, these processes may contribute up to 98% of the total latency, making the host compute-bound. Recent serialization-free approaches, such as RMMap, eliminate serialization overhead by directly mapping memory between functions in distributed serverless systems. Nevertheless, transferring raw memory produces large payloads and imposes significant network demands, rendering the process bandwidth-bound. To address these challenges, we propose HyperLink, a networkassisted system that unifies the benefits of both compute-bound and bandwidth-bound approaches. HyperLink offloads intensive serialization tasks (e.g., data compression) to programmable switches, while the host employs a lightweight memory mapping mechanism. It features a parallel striped storage module for efficient compression dictionary management, a latency-aware adaptive encoder that balances compression delays with compression ratios, and a dependency-gated parallel decoder that decouples packet-level decoding into block-level processing to enhance throughput. Experimental results show that HyperLink reduces latency by up to $\mathbf{6 8. 1 2 \%}$ and achieves $\mathbf{8. 2 5} \times$ throughput compared to state-of-the-art solutions.