Energy-efficient Resource Allocation for NOMA-assisted Mobile Edge Computing

In this paper we evaluate the effect of increased wireless spectral efficiency on the performance of mobile edge computing. Specifically, we study the energy minimization of computation offloading for a multi carrier non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) system. A joint radio-and-computational resource allocation problem is formulated, in which three different resources should be appropriately allocated, including subcarriers, transmission power and computational resources. The formulated resource allocation problem belongs to mixed integer nonlinear programming (MILNP) and is NP-hard. We propose therefore a heuristic solution consisting of two steps, NOMA clustering and subcarrier allocation, and joint computational resource and power allocation. Our numerical results show that NOMA based MEC significantly outperforms its OMA counterpart, especially in scenarios with strict delay limits, where both the transmission and the computational resources become scarce.