Could you point in the direction of some of the software radio resources? My last two years at work has had me in the embedded Bluetooth space, where we just use a proprietary soft radio blob that’s still a total black box to me.
Reddit has /r/sdr which has some good resources; me I used antirez's plane-tracker, then wrote some code to listen for buttons being pressed from remote-control buttons.
These buttons are pretty cheap and reliable, and the batteries have lasted for a year or so now. You hit the button in the bedroom and the PC in my office plays "siren.mp3" over the speakers, for example.
Even now I've had my wife/child summon me via presses.
srsLTE and tinyLTE whitepapers are worth looking into as well. The whitepapers describe the infrastructure and hardware to purchase. All in all, these are surprisingly simple to get working together. After that, it is up to you what to hack on. MEC paradigm is something specifically relevant to software engineers.