# HetRoute Heterogeneous and Cost-aware Collaborative Routing Framework for Distributed Edge MoE Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00577 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00577/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Efficient MoE training and inference systems, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 29 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [Efficient MoE training and inference systems](https://mlsanity.com/moe/efficient-moe-training-and-inference-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10438/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06865/) (2023)
- [Edge Intelligence: Paving the Last Mile of Artificial Intelligence with Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10083/) (2019)
- [MegaBlocks: Efficient Sparse Training with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15841/) (2022)
- [Tutel: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03382/) (2022)
- [Edge AI: On-Demand Accelerating Deep Neural Network Inference via Edge Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05316/) (2019)
- [Mobile Edge Intelligence for Large Language Models: A Contemporary Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18921/) (2024)
- [Distributed Deep Neural Networks over the Cloud, the Edge and End Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01921/) (2017)
- [MegaScale: Scaling Large Language Model Training to More Than 10,000 GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15627/) (2024)
- [A Review on Edge Large Language Models: Design, Execution, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11845/) (2024)
- [Petals: Collaborative Inference and Fine-tuning of Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01188/) (2022)
- [JointDNN: An Efficient Training and Inference Engine for Intelligent Mobile Cloud Computing Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08618/) (2018)
- [EdgeMoE: Empowering Sparse Large Language Models on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14352/) (2023)
- [MoE-Infinity: Efficient MoE Inference on Personal Machines with Sparsity-Aware Expert Cache](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14361/) (2024)
- [SiDA-MoE: Sparsity-Inspired Data-Aware Serving for Efficient and Scalable Large Mixture-of-Experts Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18859/) (2023)
- [HAPI: Hardware-Aware Progressive Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03997/) (2020)
- [D2MoE: Dual Routing and Dynamic Scheduling for Efficient On-Device MoE-based LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15299/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Edge Inference for Distributed MoE Models with Latency-Optimized Expert Placement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12851/) (2025)
- [Mixture-of-Experts for Distributed Edge Computing with Channel-Aware Gating Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00819/) (2025)
- [Mobility and Cost Aware Inference Accelerating Algorithm for Edge Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16497/) (2023)
- [OrderMoE: An expert similarity driven distributed edge MoE inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17154/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a dominant architecture for large-scale AI services, yet deploying them over geo-distributed heterogeneous edge servers remains challenging. When the Top-k activated experts of a token are spread across multiple servers, the optimal routing depends jointly on cross-server link bandwidth, heterogeneous GPU computing capability, GPU-CPU expert loading delay, instantaneous queueing backlog, and replica-level quantization quality loss. Existing distributed inference and MoE serving methods address these factors separately and do not provide a unified framework for online multi-server collaborative routing. In this paper, we propose HetRoute, a heterogeneous-cost-aware collaborative routing framework for distributed edge MoE inference. HetRoute introduces a unified per-assignment cost model that explicitly captures four cost components: cross-server transmission, GPU-CPU offloading, GPU computation with queueing, and quantization-induced quality penalty. Guided by this model, the offline stage determines expert server placement, GPU-CPU residency, and replica precision through a routing-cost-coupled deployment algorithm, while the online stage routes the Top-k activated expert set as a whole by minimizing the bottleneck layer cost via exact enumeration or beam search. Theoretical analysis establishes fallback feasibility, a bound on the number of participating servers, per-layer optimality for small candidate domains, and online computational complexity. Trace-driven evaluation on three MoE models over a heterogeneous 10-server edge testbed shows that HetRoute reduces average inference latency by up to 59.0% and P99 latency by up to 58.0%, cuts cross-server traffic by up to 72.1%, and achieves 2.13x throughput improvement compared with representative baselines, while keeping quality degradation within the configured budget.