Xin Yuan, Ning Li, Tuo Zhang et al.
Splitting the inference model between device, edge server, and cloud can improve the performance of EI greatly. Additionally, the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), which is the key supporting technologies of B5G/6G, can achieve massive connections and high spectrum efficiency. Motivated by the benefits of NOMA, integrating NOMA with model split in MEC to reduce the inference latency further becomes attractive. However, the NOMA based communication during split inference has not been properly considered in previous works. Therefore, in this paper, we integrate the NOMA into split inference in MEC, and propose the effective communication and computing resource allocation algorithm to accelerate the model inference at edge. Specifically, when the mobile user has a large model inference task needed to be calculated in the NOMA-based MEC, it will take the energy consumption of both device and edge server and the inference latency into account to find the optimal model split strategy, subchannel allocation strategy (uplink and downlink), and transmission power allocation strategy (uplink and downlink). Since the minimum inference delay and energy consumption cannot be satisfied simultaneously, and the variables of subchannel allocation and model split are discrete, the gradient descent (GD) algorithm is adopted to find the optimal tradeoff between them. Moreover, the loop iteration GD approach (Li-GD) is proposed to reduce the complexity of GD algorithm that caused by the parameter discrete. Additionally, the properties of the proposed algorithm are also investigated, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.