NOMA Enabled Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Joint MU-MIMO Precoding and Computation Offloading Design

This paper investigates computation offloading and transmit precoding co-design for multi-access edge computing (MEC), where multiple MEC users (MUs) equipped with multiple antennas access the MEC server in a non-orthogonal multiple access manner. We aim to minimize the total energy consumption of all MUs while satisfying the latency constraints by jointly optimizing the computational frequency, offloading ratio, and precoding matrix of each MU. For tractability, we first decompose the original problem into three subproblems and then solve these subproblems iteratively until convergence. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed method and demonstrate its superiority over baseline algorithms.

I. Introduction

With the continuous growth of mobile services, portable terminals (e.g., smartphones or tablet computers) are running more and more computation-intensive and latency-critical applications, which brings new challenges to those terminals’ batteries and central processing units (CPUs) [1]. To cope with this issue, multi-access edge computing (MEC) has been proposed. As reported in [2], by deploying MEC servers to the network edge, terminals’ huge computational burden and energy consumption can be greatly reduced.