Unified Control of Network and Compute Toward 6G In-Network Computing Service

Future 6G use cases—such as AI, sensing, and immersive Extended Reality (XR)—will require stringent end-to-end communication performance. Optimizing only the network infrastructure is insufficient; coordination between network and computing resources is essential. In this paper, we propose a unified architecture that embeds a Layer 4 proxy into the User Plane Function (UPF) to control data flow and computing resources jointly. This design allows the flow to be dynamically managed based on network conditions, while simultaneously optimizing latency and throughput. The control interface is exposed via APIs, enabling applications to dynamically activate computing services and optimize data throughput for available network bandwidth. While the architecture targets future 6G networks, its feasibility is validated on a 5G Core-based prototype to emulate 6G in-network computing scenarios under realistic workloads. Our prototype evaluation demonstrates that the proposed architecture improves throughput, reduces latency and jitter, stabilizes data flow, and enhances AI-based video object detection performance.