Energy Efficiency for MEC Offloading with NOMA through Coalitional Games

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the user association problem for mobile edge computation (MEC) offloading in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. According to NOMA, multiple users can access the MEC server to offload data simultaneously. However, resources are shared among the users which can potentially impact the required transmit power for offloading, thus increasing the total energy consumption. Aiming to minimize the overall energy consumption for all the users of the network, we formulate a problem where user association, optimal power allocation, data rate and offloaded data are jointly considered. More specifically, two coalition game algorithms are proposed and compared in an effort to efficiently reduce the total energy consumption. Simulation results show that both proposed algorithms can successfully reach a final state with low complexity, where the overall energy consumption is significantly reduced.