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In this paper, we investigate the performance gains that are achievable when jointly controlling (i) in which Small-cell Base Stations (SBSs) mobile users are associated to, (ii) which content items are stored at SBS co-located caches and (iii) which content items are recommended to the mobile users who are associated to different SBSs. We first establish a framework for the joint user association, content caching and recommendations problem, by specifying a set of necessary conditions for all three component functions of the system. Then, we provide a concrete formulation of the joint problem when the objective is to maximize the total hit ratio over all caches. We analyze the problems that emerge as special cases of the joint problem, when one of the three functions is carried out independently, and use them to characterize its complexity. Finally, we propose a heuristic that tackles the joint problem. Proof-of-concept simulations demonstrate that even this simple heuristic outperforms an optimal algorithm that takes only caching and recommendation decisions into account and provide evidence of the achievable performance gains when decisions over all three functions are jointly optimized.

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