Joint Radio and Computation Resource Allocation for NOMA-Enabled MEC in Multi-Cell Networks

Mobile edge computing (MEC) enables the users of limited computation capabilities and energy to offload their computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks to the network edge, thereby providing high quality of service to the users. In this paper, we investigate how non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques can be exploited to achieve energy-efficient MEC in multi-cell networks. To this end, we first characterize the energy efficiency of the considered system, taking into account the impact of both intra- and inter-cell interference in multi-cell networks. We then jointly optimize the subchannel allocation, power allocation, and the computation resource allocation to maximize the energy efficiency of NOMA-enabled MEC, while simultaneously satisfying the maximum tolerable delay constraints of the users. Numerical results validate our analysis and show that our proposed scheme can significantly improve the energy efficiency of NOMA-enabled MEC in multi-cell networks compared to the existing baselines.