Abstract
The rapid growth of cellular data traffic is creating a variety of challenges that will only be accentuated with the consolidation of 5G networks and the emergence of 6G networks. In order to address those challenges, prediction network management techniques, and in particular proactive network management and cellular traffic prediction will be fundamental. In this paper, we explore different research works in this area and provide a comprehensive survey. Moreover, we detail the principles of multiple statistical, machine learning, and deep learning mechanisms that can be utilized in order to address the cellular traffic prediction problem, and we evaluate their performance in the same dataset. The experimental results show that the Feedforward Neural Network model is capable of providing the best performance among the studied models for 1-step-ahead and 10-step-ahead predictions. In the case of longer-term predictions (i.e. 20-step-ahead), the performance of statistical models, such as Autoregression and Autoregression Moving Average, is shown to be superior to the other models.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Huawei Report. Communications networks 2030. https://www-file.huawei.com/-/media/corp2020/pdf/giv/industry-reports/communications_network_2030_en.pdf. Retrieved June 30, 2022.
Ericsson Mobility Report. Mobile data traffic outlook. https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/mobile-traffic-forecast. Retrieved June 30, 2022.
Bhushan, N., et al. (2014). Network densification: The dominant theme for wireless evolution into 5G. IEEE Communications Magazine, 52(2), 82–89.
Zhu, Y., & Wang, S. (2022). Traffic prediction enabled dynamic access points switching for energy saving in dense networks. Digital Communications and Networks.
Azari, A., Salehi, F., Papapetrou, P., & Cavdar, C. (2021). Energy and resource efficiency by user traffic prediction and classification in cellular networks. IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, 6(2), 1082–1095.
Shu, Y., Yu, M., Yang, O., Liu, J., & Feng, H. (2005). Wireless traffic modeling and prediction using seasonal ARIMA models. IEICE Transactions on Communications, 88(10), 3992–3999.
Azari, A., Papapetrou, P., Denic, S., & Peters, G. (2019). User traffic prediction for proactive resource management: Learning-powered approaches (pp. 1–6). IEEE.
Gao, Y., Wei, X., Zhou, L., & Lv, H. (2019). A deep learning framework with spatial-temporal attention mechanism for cellular traffic prediction (pp. 1–6). IEEE.
Zeng, Q., Sun, Q., Chen, G., & Duan, H. (2021). Attention based multi-component spatiotemporal cross-domain neural network model for wireless cellular network traffic prediction. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, 2021(1), 1–25.
Jiang, W. (2022). Cellular traffic prediction with machine learning: A survey. Expert Systems with Applications 117163.
Alekseeva, D., et al. (2021). Comparison of machine learning techniques applied to traffic prediction of real wireless network. IEEE Access, 9, 159495–159514.
Jaffry, S., & Hasan, S. F. (2020). Cellular traffic prediction using recurrent neural networks (pp. 94–98). IEEE.
Barlacchi, G., et al. (2015). A multi-source dataset of urban life in the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino. Scientific Data, 2(1), 1–15.
Zhang, J., Zuo, X., Xu, M., Han, J., & Zhang, B. (2021). Base station network traffic prediction approach based on LMA-DeepAR (pp. 473–479). IEEE.
Zhao, N., Ye, Z., Pei, Y., Liang, Y.-C., & Niyato, D. (2020). Spatial-temporal attention-convolution network for citywide cellular traffic prediction. IEEE Communications Letters, 24(11), 2532–2536.
Qiu, C., Zhang, Y., Feng, Z., Zhang, P., & Cui, S. (2018). Spatio-temporal wireless traffic prediction with recurrent neural network. IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, 7(4), 554–557.
Wang, X., et al. (2018). Spatio-temporal analysis and prediction of cellular traffic in metropolis. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 18(9), 2190–2202.
Wang, Z., et al. (2022). Spatial-temporal cellular traffic prediction for 5G and beyond: A graph neural networks-based approach. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.
Müller, M. (2007). Information retrieval for music and motion (Vol. 2). New York: Springer.
Yan, B., Wang, G., Yu, J., Jin, X., & Zhang, H. (2021). Spatial-temporal Chebyshev graph neural network for traffic flow prediction in IoT-based its. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 9(12), 9266–9279.
Zeng, Q., et al. (2020). Traffic prediction of wireless cellular networks based on deep transfer learning and cross-domain data. IEEE Access, 8, 172387–172397.
Kuber, T., Seskar, I., & Mandayam, N. (2021). Traffic prediction by augmenting cellular data with non-cellular attributes (pp. 1–6). IEEE.
Zhang, C., Zhang, H., Qiao, J., Yuan, D., & Zhang, M. (2019). Deep transfer learning for intelligent cellular traffic prediction based on cross-domain big data. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 37(6), 1389–1401.
Zhang, C., Zhang, H., Yuan, D., & Zhang, M. (2018). Citywide cellular traffic prediction based on densely connected convolutional neural networks. IEEE Communications Letters, 22(8), 1656–1659.
Azari, A., et al. Cellular traffic analysis dataset. https://github.com/AminAzari/cellular-traffic-analysis. Retrieved June 29, 2022.
Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., & Bengio, Y. (2014). Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.0473.
Weng, L. Attention? Attention! https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2018-06-24-attention/. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
Graves, A., Wayne, G., & Danihelka, I. (2014). Neural turing machines. arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.5401.
Luong, M.-T., Pham, H., & Manning, C. D. (2015). Effective approaches to attention-based neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04025.
Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30.
Triebe, O., et al. (2021) Neuralprophet: Explainable forecasting at scale. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.15397.
Facebook Open Source. Prophet. https://facebook.github.io/prophet/. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
Meta A. I. Neural prophet documentation. https://neuralprophet.com/html/contents.html. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
Raca, D., Quinlan, J. J., Zahran, A. H., & Sreenan, C. J. 4G LTE dataset. https://www.ucc.ie/en/misl/research/datasets/ivid_4g_lte_dataset/. Retrieved June 27, 2022.
Raca, D., Quinlan, J. J., Zahran, A. H., & Sreenan, C. J. (2018). Beyond throughput: A 4G LTE dataset with channel and context metrics (pp. 460–465).
Gu, R., & Zhang, J. (2019). Ganslicing: A GAN-based software defined mobile network slicing scheme for IoT applications (pp. 1–7). IEEE.
Jang, G., Kim, N., Ha, T., Lee, C., & Cho, S. (2020). Base station switching and sleep mode optimization with LSTM-based user prediction. IEEE Access, 8, 222711–222723.
Jha, H., & Vijayarajan, V. (2020). Mobile internet throughput prediction using machine learning techniques (pp. 253–257). IEEE.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Santos Escriche, E., Vassaki, S. & Peters, G. A comparative study of cellular traffic prediction mechanisms. Wireless Netw 29, 2371–2389 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-023-03313-9
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-023-03313-9