Coalitional Games for Computation Offloading in NOMA-Enabled Multi-Access Edge Computing

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are two enabling technologies in the 5 G network and beyond. MEC admits user equipments (UEs) running many more compute-intensive applications by providing computing capabilities at the network edge and within radio access networks, while NOMA enables multiple UEs to share the same resource block, thus leveraging considerable advantages such as greater spectral efficiency and a larger number of supported UEs. The state-of-the-art showed that the combination of NOMA and MEC can lower the energy consumption and/or overall latency; however, they mostly focused on single-carrier NOMA. In this paper, we investigate the computation offloading problem in multi-carrier NOMA enabled MEC systems and solve it from the cooperative game theory viewpoint using coalition formation game. Particularly, UEs are considered as game players and subcarriers are regarded as coalitions that can be used for computation offloading of multiple UEs. Based on the introduced coalition formation game, we develop a low-complexity algorithm with convergence guarantee to achieve the Nash-stable solution. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed coalition game based algorithm as well as its comparison with three baseline schemes.