A survey of people movement analytics studies in the context of smart cities

With the advent of the newest emergency call mandates in US and Europe, with the advances in cellular-based and WiFi-based localization solutions, and with the developments of cloud computing and web-based social networks, the location information and movement-related data is becoming easier and easier to collect from the user mobile devices and from the user cloud data and it is more and more used in a variety of Location Based Services and for various network planning and management tasks. The last decade has seen significant research efforts dedicated to analyze the user location and movement data, to extract mobility patterns and features and to use the predicted patterns for a more efficient resource allocation and for better location-based services. In the context of what is called today ‘the smart city’, user mobility and location data are becoming key components of the smart city architecture and applications. The goal of this paper is to give a compact and comprehensive overview of the challenges and solutions related to collecting, storing, analyzing, visualizing, using or distributing people's movement data and to summarize the purposes of such data in the context of the smart cities and the Internet of Things.