# SARA: SLO-Aware Resource Allocation for Disaggregated Agentic LLM Services

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26763 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26763/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Serving systems and request scheduling, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 28 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Serving systems and request scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/inference/serving-systems-and-request-scheduling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07104/) (2023)
- [Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02150/) (2019)
- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [Splitwise: Efficient generative LLM inference using phase splitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18677/) (2023)
- [Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02310/) (2024)
- [Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00079/) (2024)
- [Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26692/) (2025)
- [From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19678/) (2025)
- [DynamoLLM: Designing LLM Inference Clusters for Performance and Energy Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00741/) (2024)
- [Generative Pre-trained Transformer: A Comprehensive Review on Enabling Technologies, Potential Applications, Emerging Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10435/) (2023)
- [Token Communications: A Large Model-Driven Framework for Cross-modal Context-aware Semantic Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12096/) (2025)
- [ServeGen: Workload Characterization and Generation of Large Language Model Serving in Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09999/) (2025)
- [ModServe: Modality- and Stage-Aware Resource Disaggregation for Scalable Multimodal Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00937/) (2025)
- [Prefill-as-a-Service: KVCache of Next-Generation Models Could Go Cross-Datacenter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15039/) (2026)
- [Multi-Segment Attention: Enabling Efficient KV-Cache Management for Faster Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02964/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) are driving the emergence of multi-modal and agentic services for mobile users through cloud and edge infrastructures, where long-context workloads pose daunting challenges for inference latency. Existing disaggregated LLM serving systems largely rely on hardware profiling, configuration enumeration, or heuristic scheduling, offering limited analytical guidance for cost-efficient resource allocation. In this paper, we propose SARA, a Service level objectives (SLOs)-Aware Resource Allocation framework for disaggregated agentic LLM serving systems, which maximizes goodput under a deployment cost constraint and a series of quantile-based SLO constraints. By capitalizing on queuing theory, we first model the prefill, KV cache transfer, and decode stages as an M/G/k queue, an M/G/1 queue, and a generalized birth-death process, respectively. The analysis reveals that the prefill and decode stages are dominantly limited by computational capacity and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) resources, respectively. With these mathematical models, we further derive tractable tail behaviors of different stage-wise service level metrics for both light- and heavy-tailed workloads. These characterizations explicitly map workload, model architecture, and hardware parameters to stage-wise SLO constraints and minimum resource requirements. Finally, we develop an effective resource allocation framework to maximize system goodput under limited cost budgets. Simulation and hardware results demonstrate that the proposed framework accurately predicts the stage-wise SLO with mean errors below 5%, and improves system goodput by 26.6% on average over state-of-the-art baseline methods under the same deployment cost.