Energy Efficient NOMA-Based Mobile Edge Computing Offloading

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising technique to enhance computing capacity of mobile devices by offloading tasks to base station for remote execution. This letter considers a MEC system exploiting the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for both task uploading and result downloading. The total energy consumption is minimized by optimizing the transmit powers, transmission time allocation, and task offloading partitions. Specifically, after full analysis of the optimal power control solutions for both uplink and downlink, an iterative algorithm implemented by successive convex approximation is proposed to obtain the task offloading partitions and time allocation. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-based MEC offloading scheme can significantly reduce the system energy consumption compared with traditional orthogonal multiple access scheme.