Energy-Efficient Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Downlink Communication in Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Downlink mobile edge computing (MEC) networks are requiblack to serve increasing large number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with limited battery capacity. In order to serve massive user equipments with low power consumption requirements, in this paper, we propose an energy-efficient multi-carrier non-orthogonal multiple access (MC-NOMA) design which allows more than two IoT devices to multiplex and access the same subcarrier band. With the aim to minimize the total transmit energy while meeting the demands of each IoT device such as the low latency, in our design, we first derive the optimal successive interference cancellation (SIC) policy and minimum power allocated to every IoT device. Then we propose an optimal greedy algorithm to allocate the frequency blocks, and formulate the optimization of the computational resource allocation as a min-max problem. Subsequently, we characterize the MC-NOMA network with the potential game model, and present a scheduling scheme to manage massive IoT devices. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can consume 3-10 dB less energy in a MEC network deployed with 256 IoT devices compablack with the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme.