WiCi: Wireless GPU Computing Infrastructure

Abstract

LLM inference applications are gaining significant traction. The demand for inference is growing exponentially, and the GPU usage of inference is increasingly surpassing that of training. Due to the mobility penalty, edge-side inference fails to deliver satisfactory performance. Consequently, most inference service providers currently rely on cloud-based inference, which incurs substantial, not sustainable costs for enterprises, and is even increasing in the agentic paradigm. Therefore, our goal is to enable powerful computing capabilities as server-grade GPUs on mobile devices. We propose Wireless GPU Computing Infrastructure (WiCi) in this paper. Through WiCi, mobile devices can wirelessly access server-grade GPUs, running inference tasks on mobile clients but offloading GPU-related computations to a nearby GPU via WiFi. WiCi introduces a series of designs to make sure the infrastructure is scalable with different applications, compatible with different mobile devices, and has comparable performance to running on a physical GPU. We test WiCi from mobile devices and find that WiCi can reduce time to first token by up to 90%, improve the token rate by approximately 39x compared to local inference on mobile devices for the same model, and support much larger models. WiCi also achieves up to nearly 80% of the native performance of the server-grade GPU across different applications.