# Diffusing Your Mobile Apps: Extending In-Network Function Virtualization to Mobile Function Offloading

## TL;DR

This paper introduces INFv, a novel in-network function virtualization system that enables mobile app offloading within ISP networks, significantly improving energy efficiency and execution speed while maintaining transparency and scalability.

## Contribution

INFv extends NFV to mobile applications, providing a non-intrusive, scalable offloading framework that leverages in-network resources for energy and performance gains.

## Key findings

- Up to 6.9x energy reduction in mobile devices
- Up to 4x faster execution times
- Effective load balancing and resource utilization

## Abstract

Motivated by the huge disparity between the limited battery capacity of user devices and the ever-growing energy demands of modern mobile apps, we propose INFv. It is the first offloading system able to cache, migrate and dynamically execute on demand functionality from mobile devices in ISP networks. It aims to bridge this gap by extending the promising NFV paradigm to mobile applications in order to exploit in-network resources. In this paper, we present the overall design, state-of-the-art technologies adopted, and various engineering details in the INFv system. We also carefully study the deployment configurations by investigating over 20K Google Play apps, as well as thorough evaluations with realistic settings. In addition to a significant improvement in battery life (up to 6.9x energy reduction) and execution time (up to 4x faster), INFv has two distinct advantages over previous systems: 1) a non-intrusive offloading mechanism transparent to existing apps; 2) an inherent framework support to effectively balance computation load and exploit the proximity of in-network resources. Both advantages together enable a scalable and incremental deployment of computation offloading framework in practical ISPs' networks.