DRL-Assisted Resource Allocation for NOMA-MEC Offloading with Hybrid SIC

• Main Authors: Haodong Li, Fang Fang, Zhiguo Ding
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
• Series: Entropy
• Subjects: deep reinforcement learning (DRL); multi-access edge computing (MEC); resource allocation; sixth-generation (6G); user grouping
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/23/5/613

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are regarded as promising technologies to improve the computation capability and offloading efficiency of mobile devices in the sixth-generation (6G) mobile system. This paper mainly focused on the hybrid NOMA-MEC system, where multiple users were first grouped into pairs, and users in each pair offloaded their tasks simultaneously by NOMA, then a dedicated time duration was scheduled to the more delay-tolerant user for uploading the remaining data by orthogonal multiple access (OMA). For the conventional NOMA uplink transmission, successive interference cancellation (SIC) was applied to decode the superposed signals successively according to the channel state information (CSI) or the quality of service (QoS) requirement. In this work, we integrated the hybrid SIC scheme, which dynamically adapts the SIC decoding order among all NOMA groups. To solve the user grouping problem, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithm was proposed to obtain a close-to-optimal user grouping policy. Moreover, we optimally minimized the offloading energy consumption by obtaining the closed-form solution to the resource allocation problem. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm converged fast, and the NOMA-MEC scheme outperformed the existing orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme.