Joint Cooperative Computation and Communication for Demand-Side NOMA-MEC Systems With Relay Assistance in Smart Grid Communications
Pei Liu, Jianxiao Wang, Kai Ma, Qinglai Guo
Abstract
Currently, the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology is promoting the development of smart grids. However, because of the numerous loads present and the surge of data in smart grids, network congestion, transmission delay, and insufficient channel resources pose pressing challenges for accurate, real-time transmission in load control communication systems. Mobile edge computing (MEC) and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology, as new types of communication architectures, can significantly improve the communication quality in such network system. In this article, we first establish an NOMA-MEC system model with relay assistance based on cloud-edge collaboration in smart grids, aiming to minimize the energy consumption cost of the system while satisfying constraints on relay power and computation latency. In addition, we formulate a powerful four-slot transmission strategy to support cooperative computation and communication in the proposed NOMA-MEC system with relay assistance. Since the optimization problem is nonconvex, an efficient joint cooperative computation and communication algorithm with relay assistance is developed to solve it. Numerical results show that the proposed resource allocation strategy can significantly improve the communication transmission quality and reduce the energy consumption cost of the system.