  We present a framework to analyse the latency budget in wireless systems with
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Our focus is on teleoperation and telerobotics, as
use cases that are representative of mission-critical uplink-intensive IoT
systems with requirements on low latency and high reliability. The study is
motivated by a general question: What is the optimal compression strategy in
reliability and latency constrained systems? We address this question by
studying the latency of an uplink connection from a multi-sensor IoT device to
the base station. This is a critical link tasked with a timely and reliable
transfer of potentially significant amount of data from the multitude of
sensors. We introduce a comprehensive model for the latency budget,
incorporating data compression and data transmission. The uplink latency is a
random variable whose distribution depends on the computational capabilities of
the device and on the properties of the wireless link. We formulate two
optimization problems corresponding to two transmission strategies: (1)
Outage-constrained, and (2) Latency-constrained. We derive the optimal system
parameters under a reliability criterion. We show that the obtained results are
superior compared to the ones based on the optimization of the expected
latency.
