Workflow-Aware Expert Routing for Distributed LLM Serving Over the Edge-Cloud Continuum

Abstract

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) over the edge-cloud continuum faces severe stability challenges due to the conflict between stochastic network topology and complex workflow dependencies. Existing schedulers, relying either on computationally prohibitive Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) or topology-agnostic heuristics, fail to reconcile this tension. To bridge these gaps, we propose STEM, a service-level and topology-aware orchestration framework that formulates distributed LLM serving as a workflow-aware routing problem over a monitored service overlay, in which heterogeneous service instances act as specialized experts. At the core of STEM lies the STAR-PPO algorithm, utilizing a lightweight graph-free perception mechanism. By leveraging Squeeze-and-Excitation attention, it extracts critical bottleneck features from raw telemetry with linear complexity, bypassing the scalability limits of message-passing paradigms. To further achieve Pareto-efficient trade-offs, we develop a Dynamic Weight Adaptation (DWA) mechanism that autonomously recalibrates optimization preferences based on entropy-regularized metric drift. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets spanning 2,000 nodes demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, STAR-PPO reduces network transmission costs by 96.8% and improves comprehensive inference efficiency by 24.4%, while sustaining robust zero-shot generalization across regions, with average latency within $1.09\times $ of a target-domain-retrained reference under a strict cross-region protocol. Code and data are available at https://github.com/gymorsiback/STARPPO