Cellular Traffic Prediction Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Predictive analysis on cellular traffic is important for the control and monitoring of wireless networks. Cellular traffic prediction is a challenging problem due to the non- stationarity and dynamic spatial-temporal correlation of the traffic. In this paper, we address the problem of accurate traffic prediction in a base station by proposing a deep neural network called RAConv. Its structure includes residual network, attention mechanism, and deep convolutional network. In the proposed architecture, a deep 3D residual convolutional network (ResConv3D) with three residual blocks are employed to learn the local spatial-temporal features. An attention-aided convolutional long short-term memory network (AConvLSTM) is then used to capture the long-term spatial-temporal dependencies. The use of the attention modules enable the network to focus on the most important spatial-temporal information. We evaluate the performance of the proposed RAConv network using a dataset provided by a Canadian wireless service provider. We consider the traffic prediction on two time scales (i.e., hourly and daily), which exhibit different spatial-temporal dependency patterns. Experimental results show that the proposed RAConv network can achieve accurate prediction under both time scales. Results also show that our proposed network provides a lower root-mean-square error (RMSE) than the conventional ConvLSTM baseline scheme.