STEP: A Spatio-Temporal Fine-Granular User Traffic Prediction System for Cellular Networks

Abstract

While traffic modeling and prediction are at the heart of providing high-quality telecommunication services in cellular networks and attract much attention, they have been approved as an extremely challenging task. Due to the diverse network demand of Internet-based apps, the cellular traffic from an individual user can have a wide dynamic range. Most existing methods, on the other hand, model traffic patterns as probabilistic distributions or stochastic processes and impose stringent assumptions over these models. Such assumptions may be beneficial at providing closed-form formula in evaluating prediction performances, but fall short for practice use. In this paper we propose STEP, a <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>s</b></u> patio- <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>te</b></u> mporal fine-granular user traffic <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>p</b></u> rediction mechanism for cellular networks. A deep graph convolution network, called GCGRN, is constructed. It is a novel combination of the graph convolution network (GCN) and gated recurrent units (GRU), which exploits graph neural network to learn an efficient spatio-temporal model from a user’s massive dataset for traffic prediction. The prototype of STEP has been implemented. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art time-series based approaches. Besides, STEP merely incurs mild energy consumption, communication overhead and system resource occupancy to mobile devices. Moreover, NS-3 based simulations validate the efficacy of STEP in reducing session dropping ratio in cellular networks.