A Joint Sensing and Communication Framework in Resource Constrained Mobile Edge Networks

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is a promising paradigm which leverages sensor-embedded mobile devices to collect and share data. To perform a sensing task in MCS, appropriate participating users are selected first, and efficient data sensing and transmission policies are then designed for data aggregation. In mobile edge networks, network resource availability affects how to select the participating users, and the bandwidth allocated to a user affects its process of data sensing and transmission. Since user selection, bandwidth allocation, data sensing and transmission are closely coupled issues in a resource constrained MCS system, we focus on designing a joint sensing and communication framework in this paper, by jointly optimizing the aforementioned four policies under resource constraints. Specifically, the optimal data sensing and transmission policies are first derived under a given user selection and bandwidth allocation scheme. Then the user selection and bandwidth allocation are optimized based on dynamic programming. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism significantly outperforms several baseline solutions without considering wireless link vulnerability and/or resource limitations.