A system, method and architecture for network-assisted scanning of a surrounding environment (500). In one embodiment, the system is operative for receiving (202) real world object identification and spatial mapping data relative to a plurality of real world scenarios sensed by sensing points, each operating as a collection agent (102-1, 302, 813) configured to collect environmental data in association with a plurality of sensors. The data may be prioritized (204) responsive to at least one of a determination of RAN resource capacity available to the collection agent (102-1, 302, 813), e.g., compute resources, storage resources, radio transmission resources, cost of the transmission capacity available to the collection agent, etc. in view of urgency/relevance of the data. Responsive to prioritizing the environmental data, one or more pieces of the environmental data may be transmitted to a nearest edge compute location (318) and/or a cloud-based datacenter network node (352).