Energy-Efficient Multi-UAV-Enabled Multiaccess Edge Computing Incorporating NOMA

Multiaccess edge computing (MEC) is regarded as a promising solution to overcome the limit on the computation capacity of mobile devices. This article investigates an energy-efficient unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled MEC framework incorporating nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA), where multiple UAVs are deployed as edge servers to provide computation assistance to terrestrial users and NOMA is adopted to reduce the energy consumption of task offloading. A utility is formed to mathematically evaluate the weighted energy cost of the system. Due to the coupling of parameters, the minimization of utility is a highly nonconvex problem and therefore, the problem is decomposed into two more tractable subproblems, i.e., the optimal allocation of radio and computation resources given UAV trajectories, and the trajectory planning based on given resource allocation schemes. These two problems are converted to convex ones via successive convex approximation (SCA) and quadratic approximation, respectively. Then, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed where these two subproblems are alternately solved to gradually approach the optimal resource management of the proposed system. Sufficient numerical results show that our proposed strategy has a remarkable advantage over existing systems in terms of energy efficiency.