Energy Consumption Minimization for NOMA-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing in IoT Network

Hao Xu, Yulin Hu, Yao Zhu, Peng Sun, Anke Schmeink

Abstract: Enabling Mobile edge computing (MEC) services with massive connectivity and low energy consumption is crucial for future Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures. In this article, we investigate an IoT network, where MEC is adopted as the computing framework for complicated IoT services while nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is introduced to enable the interdependent data input offloading from multiple IoT devices to an edge server. The MEC service frame consists of a communication phase and a computation phase, where the latter phase requires the complete data offloaded in the former one to complete a specific task. To minimize the weighted sum energy consumption of both users and the edge server, a joint resource allocation original problem is formulated, which is unfortunately nonconvex. To tackle the difficulty, we first decompose the problem into subproblems, and characterize the structure of optimal solution to the subproblems. Following the characterization, the original problem is reformulated into a tractable one. We then develop a Branch-Reduce-and-Bound (BRB) based algorithm to obtain the optimal solution. Additionally, to further investigate the MEC scenario with the offloading of multiple users, we apply the state-of-the-art hybrid NOMA (H-NOMA) scheme to evaluate its benefits to multiuser MEC. We rigorously prove that, with interdependent user data inputs, pure NOMA (P-NOMA) is not only a special case but also an optimal case of H-NOMA. Via simulation, the analytical findings and the proposed algorithm are validated and evaluated.

External IDs:dblp:journals/iotj/XuHZSS25