RequestRouter: Request-Boundary Routing for Efficient Single-GPU LLM Inference

Abstract

RequestRouter is a lightweight request-boundary controller for reducing the latency and energy cost of single-GPU large language model inference. Rather than serving all requests with one static configuration, the system uses cheap request-level features to select one fixed inference mode per request, including FP16, quantized inference, speculative decoding, prefix caching, continuous batching, and hybrid modes such as GPTQ plus prefix caching and INT8 plus continuous batching. We evaluate RequestRouter using an 8B instruction-tuned language model served through vLLM on NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Across the full-scale A100 evaluation--26,500 fixed-mode evaluations followed by 3,500 online-controller evaluations, for 30,000 measured inference executions in total--the controller achieves a 2.10x mean latency speedup over FP16 and a 0.48x energy ratio on deployment-style workloads. A smaller matched evaluation with repeated measurements provides a controlled statistical check of this result: RequestRouter retains a 1.93x latency speedup (95% CI: 1.88--1.98x) and a 0.523 energy ratio (95% CI: 0.506--0.540), showing that the gains persist under a more tightly controlled protocol. On a separate expanded automatic benchmark evaluation, the routed policy retains 99.6% of FP16 macro accuracy. A 100,000-call CPU microbenchmark measures only 0.00475 ms mean routing overhead (0.00532 ms p99). Thus, simple request-aware routing can recover substantial serving efficiency without retraining or modifying the underlying LLM.