  Motivated by the huge disparity between the limited battery capacity of user
devices and the ever-growing energy demands of modern mobile apps, we propose
INFv. It is the first offloading system able to cache, migrate and dynamically
execute on demand functionality from mobile devices in ISP networks. It aims to
bridge this gap by extending the promising NFV paradigm to mobile applications
in order to exploit in-network resources. In this paper, we present the overall
design, state-of-the-art technologies adopted, and various engineering details
in the INFv system. We also carefully study the deployment configurations by
investigating over 20K Google Play apps, as well as thorough evaluations with
realistic settings. In addition to a significant improvement in battery life
(up to 6.9x energy reduction) and execution time (up to 4x faster), INFv has
two distinct advantages over previous systems: 1) a non-intrusive offloading
mechanism transparent to existing apps; 2) an inherent framework support to
effectively balance computation load and exploit the proximity of in-network
resources. Both advantages together enable a scalable and incremental
deployment of computation offloading framework in practical ISPs' networks.
