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 an MEC system exploiting the nonorthogonal 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, with the obtained optimal power control solutions, the task offloading partitions and time allocation are obtained by the successive convex approximation algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-based MEC offloading scheme can significantly reduce the system energy consumption compared with a traditional orthogonal multiple access scheme.