Abstract: Existing studies on mobile edge computing (MEC) networks based on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have ignored hardware impairments in the transceiver, and thus the impacts of hardware impairments on the NOMA-MEC networks is unclear in terms of the computational performance. A NOMA-MEC network consisting of two edge users and an MEC server is considered, and the probability of successful computation, for given hardware impairment parameters, is derived by means of stochastic processes. Based on this, the task successful computation probability is maximized by jointly optimizing the partial offloading strategy and the user transmit power, and the optimal solution is derived into the closed form. The simulations show that 1) hardware impairment causes a bottleneck in the probability of successful computation, i.e. when the NOMA user transmit power is infinite, the probability of successful computation tends to be a constant and that is less than one; 2) the probability of successful computation of the user task decreases as the impairment factor increases.

Key words: hardware impairment,, non-orthogonal multiple access,, edge computing, successful computation probability