Mobile traffic prediction with attention-based hybrid deep learning

Mobile data consumption is ever-increasing due to the continuous emergence of bandwidth-hungry mobile applications as well as the drastic increase in number of mobile terminals resulted from the pervasive adoption of Internet of Things. In the 5G+ era, network operators have to deal with new technical challenges on network management, resource optimization and mobility scheduling, which require the ability to perform efficient mobile traffic prediction. Traditional prediction methods using convex optimization, Markov model and linear equations cannot describe the various nonlinearity changes of network traffic. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic prediction algorithm for mobile networks by introducing a hybrid deep learning method equipped with the attention mechanism, which analyzes the traffic in cellular zones to determine the spatiotemporal characteristics in the residential community. The hybrid deep learning model includes autoregressive integrated moving average mode (ARIMA) preprocessing with decomposition ability for time series, external spatial feature variables, sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq; attention-based CNN-LSTM) pretraining and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) optimization processing for integrating nonlinear relationships. The CNN method shows good nonlinear generalization ability to mine deep features of community traffic and capture the nonlinear trend. Our proposed approach first decomposes the community traffic data into linear and residual parts through ARIMA and then seizes the deep features of community traffic through the constructed pretraining seq2seq framework. Finally, the pretraining outcomes are further adjusted by the XGBoost method. Simulation results show that the proposed solution improves the accuracy of prediction apparently.