Socially Aware Joint Resource Allocation and Computation Offloading in NOMA-Aided Energy-Harvesting Massive IoT

As a typical usage scenario for the next-generation mobile communication network, massive Internet of Things (mIoT) is requested to provide high machine-type communication device (MTCD) density service. Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and mobile-edge computing (MEC) can further enhance the performance of mIoT. Furthermore, to cope with the energy consumption constraint of MTCD, energy harvesting (EH) can be leveraged. In this article, considering the social trusts of MTCDs, we propose an MEC offloading scheme for cellular Internet of Things networks with massive NOMA-aided EH MTCD and several road side units with edge servers randomly distributed in a macrocell. We aim to maximize the total sum rate of the network by jointly considering the processing mode selection, device clustering, subchannel allocation, and power allocation while satisfying the power, energy, latency, and quality of service requirements. To this end, we prove the NP-hardness of the considered optimization problem and decompose it into three subproblems, which can be solved by an iterative algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme.