MEC in NOMA-HetNets: A Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation Approach

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been regarded as a promising technology to liberate the resource-limited users from computation-intensive and latency-sensitive tasks by computation offloading. Furthermore, implementing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology in heterogeneous networks (HetNets) has become a trend to improve system throughput and spectrum efficiency. Exploiting these benefits, we investigate the joint task offloading and resource allocation problem for MEC in NOMA-based HetNets. To minimize the energy consumption of all users, we jointly consider task offloading decision, local CPU frequency scheduling, power control, computation resource and subchannel resource allocation. The optimization problem is challenging due to the strong coupling between offloading decision and resource allocation. We thus decouple the problem into two sub-problems of offloading decision and resource allocation, and propose an efficient approach to find the joint solution by solving these two sub-problems iteratively. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can efficiently lower energy consumption of users compared to other benchmark schemes with an acceptable complexity.