Driven by the explosive growth in computation-intensive applications in future 5G networks and industries, mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables smart terminals (STs) to offload their computation workloads to nearby edge servers (ESs) in radio access networks, has attracted increasing attention. In this article, we investigate the energy-efficient multitask multiaccess MEC via nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Exploiting NOMA, an ST with multiple tasks can offload the respective computation workloads of different tasks to different ESs simultaneously. To study this problem, we adopt a two-step approach. Specifically, we first consider a given task-ES assignment and formulate a joint optimization of the tasks’ computation offloading, local computation-resource allocation, and the NOMA-transmission duration, with the objective of minimizing the ST's total energy consumption for completing all tasks. Next, based on the optimal offloading solution for the given task-ES assignment, we further investigate how to properly assign different tasks to the ESs for further minimizing the ST's total energy consumption. For both the formulated problems, we propose efficient algorithms to compute the respective solutions. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. The results also show that our proposed NOMA-enabled multitask multiaccess computation offloading can outperform conventional orthogonal multiple access based offloading scheme, especially when the tasks have heavy computation-workload requirements and stringent delay limits.

中文翻译：

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通过物联网 NOMA 传输实现节能多任务多访问计算卸载


在未来 5G 网络和行业中计算密集型应用爆炸式增长的推动下，移动边缘计算 (MEC) 能够使智能终端 (ST) 将其计算工作负载卸载到无线接入网络中附近的边缘服务器 (ES)，从而吸引了众多企业的关注。日益受到关注。在本文中，我们通过非正交多址 (NOMA) 研究节能的多任务多址 MEC。利用NOMA，具有多个任务的ST可以将不同任务各自的计算工作量同时卸载到不同的ES。为了研究这个问题，我们采用两步法。具体来说，我们首先考虑给定的任务 ES 分配，并制定任务计算卸载、本地计算资源分配和 NOMA 传输持续时间的联合优化，目标是最小化 ST 完成所有任务的总能耗。接下来，基于给定任务ES分配的最佳卸载解决方案，我们进一步研究如何正确地将不同的任务分配给ES，以进一步最小化ST的总能耗。对于这两个提出的问题，我们提出了有效的算法来计算各自的解决方案。提供数值结果来验证我们提出的算法的有效性。结果还表明，我们提出的支持 NOMA 的多任务多访问计算卸载可以优于传统的基于正交多访问的卸载方案，特别是当任务具有繁重的计算工作负载要求和严格的延迟限制时。