Achievable Computation Rate in NOMA-Based Wireless-Powered Networks Assisted by Multiple Fog Servers

This article investigates a multifog server (FS)-assisted nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based wireless powered network, where an energy-limited wireless device (WD) first harvests energy from a power transmitter (PT) and multiple helping FSs and then uses the harvested energy to partially offload its computing task to the FSs with NOMA for computing. To explore the WD’s performance limit in terms of achievable computation rate, an optimization problem is formulated by jointly optimizing the time assignment, the power allocation, and the computation frequency under multiple system constraints. Since the problem is nonconvex with no known solution, an efficient solution approach is designed to achieve the
$\epsilon $
-optimal solution, in which the transmit power vector and the computation frequency are jointly optimized with fixed-time assignment, and then, a golden section search (GSS)-based algorithm is designed to find the optimal time assignment. For the case when the FS is with sufficiently strong computation capability, some semiclosed-form results are derived. Numerous results show that our proposed design achieves much higher computation rate than benchmark schemes. Moreover, with the increment of the helping FSs, the achievable computation rate increases while the increasing rate is decreased. Besides, by employing NOMA, the WD’s computation rate is also improved compared with orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based scheme. Additionally, in such a system, with nonlinear energy harvesting (EH) model adopted, the more the helping FSs are deployed, the more the performance loss caused by the traditional linear EH model can be reduced.