ElaSe: Enabling Real-time Elastic Sensing Resource Scheduling in 5G vRAN

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) has been witnessed to be a new paradigm of wireless sensing in 5G networks. Users can benefit from pervasive sensing applications in various scenarios with no communication penalty. Given the diverse demands for sensing resources across different sensing tasks, elastic resource scheduling becomes crucial, particularly when resources are constrained. However, existing approaches often treat users equally, limiting their applicability in dealing with diverse sensing tasks in the real world. In this paper, we introduce ElaSe, a pioneering sensing technique that enables real-time elastic scheduling of sensing resources. At the core of ElaSa is the exploration of the user's state to precisely determine the sensing resource requirements and schedule resources accordingly. We build the first model for matching sensing resources with sensing demands, and further propose a predictive scheduling scheme to eliminate delays by leveraging the 5G virtualized radio access network (vRAN). We conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of ElaSe under different settings. The results demonstrate that ElaSe outperforms the non-scheduling scheme, with a 34% reduction in trajectory tracking error and a 92% decrease in resource allocation error.