A Unified Framework for Joint Sensing and Communication 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. The key challenging issues in designing an MCS system include selecting appropriate users to participate in a specific sensing task and designing efficient data sensing and transmission policies for data aggregation. In mobile edge networks, the limitation on network resources including bandwidth and energy affects the design of MCS significantly. Specifically, the limited resources affect whether and how to select users for a sensing task, and the bandwidth allocated to a user affects its data sensing and transmission policies. Since user selection, bandwidth allocation, data sensing and transmission are closely coupled issues in MCS, we focus on designing a unified framework for joint sensing and communication in this paper, by jointly optimizing the aforementioned four policies under resource constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed unified framework significantly outperforms several baseline solutions without considering wireless link vulnerability and/or resource limitations.