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With the popularity of smart mobile terminals and advances in wireless communication and positioning technologies, Geo-Social Networks (GSNs), which combine location awareness and social service functions, have become increasingly prevalent. The increasing amount of user and location information in GSNs makes the information overload phenomenon more and more serious. Although massive user-generated data brings convenience to users' social and travel activities, it also causes certain trouble for their daily life. In this context, users are expecting smarter mobile applications, so that the location information can be employed to perceive their surrounding environment intelligently and further mine their behavior patterns in GSNs, which ultimately provides personalized location-based services for users. Therefore, research on user location prediction comes into existence and has received extensive and in-depth attention from researchers. Through systematically analyzing the location data carried by user check-ins and comments, user location prediction can mine various user behavior patterns and personal preferences, thus determining the visiting location of users in the future. Research on user location prediction is still in the ascendant and it has become an important topic of common concern in both academia and industry. This survey takes Geo-social networking data as the focal point to elaborate the recent progress in user location prediction from multiple aspects such as problem categories, data sources, feature extraction, mathematical models and evaluation metrics. Besides, the difficulties to be studied and the future developmental trends of user location prediction are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile Cloud Computing refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing occur outside of the mobile device. Mobile cloud applications move the computing power and data storage away from mobile devices and into the cloud, bringing applications and mobile computing not only to smartphone users but also to a much broader range of mobile subscribers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Computation offloading is a proven successful paradigm for enabling resource-intensive applications on mobile devices. Moreover, in view of emerging mobile collaborative application, the offloaded tasks can be duplicated when multiple users are in the same proximity. This motivates us to design a collaborative offloading scheme and cache the popular computation results that are likely to be reused by other mobile users. In this paper, we consider the scenario where multiple mobile users offload duplicated computation tasks to the network edge, and share the computation results among them. Our goal is to develop the optimal fine-grained collaborative offloading strategies with caching enhancements to minimize the overall execution delay at the mobile terminal side. To this end, we propose an optimal offloading with caching-enhancement scheme (OOCS) for femto-cloud scenario and mobile edge computing scenario, respectively. Simulation results show that compared to six alternative solutions in literature, our single-user OOCS can reduce execution delay up to $42.83$ % and $33.28$ % for single-user femto-cloud and single-user mobile edge computing, respectively. Our multi-user OOCS can further reduce $11.71$ % delay compared to single-user OOCS through users’ cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile-edge cloud computing is a new paradigm to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of pervasive radio access networks in close proximity to mobile users. Aiming at provisioning flexible on-demand mobile-edge cloud service, in this paper we propose a comprehensive framework consisting of a resource-efficient computation offloading mechanism for users and a joint communication and computation (JCC) resource allocation mechanism for network operator. Specifically, we first study the resource-efficient computation offloading problem for a user, in order to reduce user's resource occupation by determining its optimal communication and computation resource profile with minimum resource occupation and meanwhile satisfying the QoS constraint. We then tackle the critical problem of user admission control for JCC resource allocation, in order to properly select the set of users for resource demand satisfaction. We show the admission control problem is NP-hard, and hence develop an efficient approximation solution of a low complexity by carefully designing the user ranking criteria and rigourously derive its performance guarantee. To prevent the manipulation that some users may untruthfully report their valuations in acquiring mobile-edge cloud service, we further resort to the powerful tool of critical value approach to design truthful pricing scheme for JCC resource allocation. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed schemes can achieve superior performance for on-demand mobile-edge cloud computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]