6G In-Network Computing Architecture for Service Acceleration Prototype and Evaluation

Since cloud technology is rapidly advancing and spreading, is playing an increasingly important role in society, and will be widely used as the foundation for mobile network systems, innovative concepts called in-network computing (INC), in which computing functions are deployed, are widely considered for network and service functions. One of the benefits provided by INC is the optimization of computing and networking processing stacks. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for a mobile network equipped with computing capabilities called the Innetwork Service Acceleration Platform (ISAP). This enables end-to-end service performance acceleration, realizing processing optimization. We also present a prototype implementation of ISAP that integrates network and computing functions into a shared data plane on the basis of our proposed architecture, which includes a 3GPP standard-compliant 5G core network, server-less orchestration mechanisms, and multiple accelerator cards. Evaluations, including simulation and performance measurements, show ISAP has advantages over conventional designs, such as improved resource utilization efficiency, low latency, and deterministic service and network processing. These results validate our proposed scheme for realizing 6G INC.