Multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables mobile users (MUs) to offload their computation-workloads to the computation-servers located at the edge of cellular networks via multi-access radio access, has been considered as a promising technique to address the explosively growing computation-intensive applications in mobile Internet services. In this paper, by exploiting non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for improving the efficiency of multi-access radio transmission, we study the NOMA-enabled multi-access MEC. We aim at minimizing the overall-delay of the MUs for finishing their computation requirements, by jointly optimizing the MUs' offloaded workloads and the NOMA transmission-time. Despite the non-convexity of the formulated joint optimization problem, we propose efficient algorithms to find the optimal offloading solution. For the single-MU case, we exploit the layered structure of the problem, and propose an efficient layered algorithm to find the MU's optimal offloading solution that minimizes its overall-delay. For the multi-MU case, we propose a distributed algorithm (in which the MUs individually optimize their respective offloaded workloads) to determine the optimal offloading solution for minimizing the sum of all MUs' overall-delay. Extensive numerical results have been provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and the performance advantage of our NOMA-enabled multi-access MEC in comparison with conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) enabled multi-access MEC.

Deep learning has recently been applied to automatically classify the modulation categories of received radio signals without manual experience. However, training deep learning models requires massive volume of data. An insufficient training data will cause serious overfitting problem and degrade the classification accuracy. To cope with small dataset, data augmentation has been widely used in image processing to expand the dataset and improve the robustness of deep learning models. However, in wireless communication areas, the effect of different data augmentation methods on radio modulation classification has not been studied yet. In this paper, we evaluate different data augmentation methods via a state-of-the-art deep learning-based modulation classifier. Based on the characteristics of modulated signals, three augmentation methods are considered, i.e., rotation, flip, and Gaussian noise, which can be applied in both training phase and inference phase of the deep learning algorithm. Numerical results show that all three augmentation methods can improve the classification accuracy. Among which, the rotation augmentation method outperforms the flip method, both of which achieve higher classification accuracy than the Gaussian noise method. Given only 12.5% of training dataset, a joint rotation and flip augmentation policy can achieve even higher classification accuracy than the baseline with initial 100% training dataset without augmentation. Furthermore, with data augmentation, radio modulation categories can be successfully classified using shorter radio samples, leading to a simplified deep learning model and shorter the classification response time.

Multi-access mobile edge computing (MA-MEC) has been envisioned as one of the key approaches for enabling computation-intensive yet delay-sensitive services in future industrial Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we exploit non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for the computation offloading in MA-MEC and propose a joint optimization of the multi-access multi-task computation offloading, NOMA transmission, and computation-resource allocation, with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption of IoT device to complete its tasks subject to the required latency-limit. We firstly focus on a static channel scenario and propose a distributed algorithm to solve the joint optimization problem by identifying the layered structure of the formulated non-convex problem. Furthermore, we consider a dynamic channel scenario in which the channel power gains from the IoT device to the edge-computing servers are time-varying. To tackle with the difficulty due to the huge number of different channel realizations in the dynamic scenario, we propose an online algorithm, which is based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), to efficiently learn the near-optimal offloading solutions for the time-varying channel realizations. Numerical results are provided to validate our distributed algorithm for the static channel scenario and the DRL based online algorithm for the dynamic channel scenario.

The emerging non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which enables mobile users (MUs) to share same frequency channel simultaneously, has been considered as a spectrum-efficient multiple access scheme to accommodate tremendous traffic growth in future cellular networks. In this paper, we investigate the NOMA downlink relay-transmission, in which the macro base station (BS) first uses NOMA to transmit to a group of relays, and all relays then use NOMA to transmit their respectively received data to an MU. In specific, we propose an optimal power allocation problem for the BS and relays to maximize the overall throughput delivered to the MU. Despite the non-convexity of the problem, we adopt the vertical decomposition and propose a layered-algorithm to efficiently compute the optimal power allocation solution. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA relay-transmission can increase the throughput up to 30 percent compared with the conventional time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, and we find that increasing the relays' power capacity can increase the throughput gain of the NOMA relay against the TDMA relay. Furthermore, to improve the throughput under weak channel power gains, we propose a hybrid NOMA (HB-NOMA) relay that adaptively exploits the benefit of NOMA relay and that of the interference-free TDMA relay. By using the throughput provided by the HB-NOMA relay for each individual MU, we study the multi-MUs scenario and investigate the multi-MUs scheduling problem over a long-term period to maximize the overall utility of all MUs. Numerical results demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed multi-MUs scheduling that adopts the HB-NOMA relay-transmission.

Federated learning (FL) has been considered as a promising paradigm for enabling distributed training/learning in many machine-learning services without revealing users’ local data. Driven by the growing interests in exploiting FL in wireless networks, this paper studies the Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) assisted FL in which a group of end-devices (EDs) form a NOMA cluster to send their locally trained models to the cellular base station (BS) for model aggregation. In particular, we consider that the BS adopts wireless power transfer (WPT) to power the EDs (for their data transmission and local training) in each round of FL iteration, and formulate a joint optimization of the BS’s WPT for different EDs, the EDs’ NOMA-transmission for sending the local models to the BS, the BS’s broadcasting of the aggregated model to all EDs, the processing-rates of the BS and EDs, as well as the training-accuracy of the FL, with the objective of minimizing the system-wise cost accounting for the total energy consumption as well as the FL convergence latency. In spite of the strict non-convexity of the joint optimization problem, we analytically characterize the BS’s and all EDs’ optimal processing-rates, based on which we propose a layered algorithm for finding the optimal solutions for the joint optimization problem via exploiting monotonic optimization. Numerical results validate that our algorithm can achieve the optimal solution as LINGO’s global-solver (i.e., a commercial optimization package) while significantly reducing the computation-time. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that our NOMA assisted FL can reduce the system cost compared to the benchmark FL scheme with the fixed local training-accuracy by more than 70% and the conventional frequency division multiple access (FDMA) based FL by 78%.