Next generation communication networks are expected to accommodate a high number of new and resource-voracious applications that can be offered to a large range of end users. Even though end devices are becoming more powerful, the available local resources cannot cope with the requirements of these applications. This has created a new challenge called task offloading, where computation intensive tasks need to be offloaded to more resource powerful remote devices. Naturally, the Cloud Computing is a well-tested infrastructure that can facilitate the task offloading. However, Cloud Computing as a centralized and distant infrastructure creates significant communication delays that cannot satisfy the requirements of the emerging delay-sensitive applications. To this end, the concept of Edge Computing has been proposed, where the Cloud Computing capabilities are repositioned closer to the end devices at the edge of the network. This paper provides a detailed survey of how the Edge and/or Cloud can be combined together to facilitate the task offloading problem. Particular emphasis is given on the mathematical, artificial intelligence and control theory optimization approaches that can be used to satisfy the various objectives, constraints and dynamic conditions of this end-to-end application execution approach. The survey concludes with identifying open challenges and future directions of the problem at hand.

In the context of social well-being and context awareness several eHealth applications have been focused on tracking activities, such as sleep or specific fitness habits, with the purpose of promoting physical well-being with increasing success. Sensing technology can, however, be applied to improve social well-being, in addition to physical well-being. This paper addresses NSense, a tool that has been developed to capture and to infer social interaction patterns aiming to assist in the promotion of social well-being. Experiments carried out under realistic settings validate the NSense performance in terms of its capability to infer social interaction context based on our proposed computational utility functions. Traces obtained during the experiments are available via the CRAWDAD international trace repository.

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Current developments in computer vision and networking have made immersive applications, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR), more affordable. As the driving force behind these types of applications is the high Quality of Service (QoS), more and more studies concentrate on offloading the application tasks to more powerful computing infrastructures without impairing the immersive user experience. This generates the problem of task offloading, defined as the transfer of resource-intensive computational tasks from a local device to an external resourcerich platform such as Cloud and/or Edge computing. Task offloading can be deemed extremely beneficial for low latency applications, however introducing several challenges in terms of task scheduling and allocation. These challenges are usually tackled via traditional optimization algorithms that can output at the same time which segments to offload and to which site (e.g. an Edge or Cloud server). These algorithms usually leverage basic input information such as task size, available computational and communication resources, etc. Going a step beyond, in this work, we propose a novel model that is able to blend the user association information through Social Network Analysis metrics and especially node centrality during the task offloading decision in an Edge infrastructure. Our results show that our approach can reduce the communication delay towards increasing the user experience.

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