An Energy-Efficient Scheme Design for NOMA-Based UAV-Assisted MEC Systems

Abstract

UAV-assisted MEC networks provide extensive communication coverage and massive computation services for mobile terminals (MTs), which are considered a promising edge paradigm to support future air–ground integrated communications. In this paper, an energy-efficient scheme in NOMA-based UAV-assisted MEC systems is proposed to address the system’s energy constraints and its inability to support massive MT access. Our goal is to minimize system-weighted energy consumption by jointly optimizing the allocation of transmission power, computation resources, and UAV trajectory scheduling. As the formulated problem is non-convex and difficult to solve directly, we decompose it into two manageable sub-problems and propose an iterative algorithm based on successive convex approximations (SCA) to solve each sub-problem alternatively. Simulation results show that the proposed joint optimization algorithm achieves a significant performance improvement compared to other benchmark approaches.