Computation offloading in cognitive radio NOMA‐enabled multi‐access edge computing systems

The explosive growth of end devices and mobile applications calls for novel schemes that can enable computation‐hungry applications at small end‐devices and meet the massive connectivity requirement. Cognitive radio (CR), non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and multi‐access edge computing (MEC) are envisioned as the key technologies in fifth‐generation and beyond. In this work, the authors introduce the concept of CR‐NOMA in MEC offloading, where a secondary user (SU) can utilise the spectrum allocated to a primary user (PU) to offload its computation task to the MEC server for remote execution. For the spectrum utilisation, an equation to specify the minimum transmit power that must be allocated to the PU is derived. The authors also develop an algorithm to determine the offloading decision (i.e. offloading or not) and the paired PU (i.e. subcarrier used for computation offloading) for SUs, using one‐to‐one matching game. Moreover, through numerical simulations, the authors demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared with several baseline schemes.