Performance Analysis of an UAV-Assisted NOMA-Based on MEC in IoT Network with Wireless Power Transfer

This article investigates an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based on mobileedge computing (MEC) with wireless power transfer (WPT) in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Consider an urban scenario where an UAV embedded with a MEC sever helps two clusters of resource-restricted IoT devices (IDs) in providing energy and handling computational tasks. Accordingly, we propose a four-phased protocol called time switching (TS) - radio frequency (RF)-WPT UAV NOMA MEC (TS-RUNM), which comprises of harvesting energy, offloading tasks, computing data, and returning results. To assess the system performance, we derive the closed-form expressions of outage probability (OP and successful computation probability (SCP) for the whole system in consideration of imperfect channel state information (ICSI) over Nakagami-m fading channel. Furthermore, we formulate system performance optimization problems with the goal of minimizing OP and maximizing SCP.. The solution is based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm that establishes optimal values for UAV’s position and altitude. In addition, the Monte Carlo simulations are conducted with diverse system parameters to validate the precision of our study.