Internet traffic matrix prediction with convolutional LSTM neural network

Abstract

With the rapid growing trend of Internet, prediction‐based network operation optimization and management has drawn the attention from both the academia and the industry. For predicting Internet traffic, deep learning models have been proven more effective than linear and statistical models. However, some of the previous studies model the Internet traffic prediction as a multivariate time series prediction problem simply, without using the Internet traffic matrix structure. In this letter, the Internet traffic matrix prediction problem is firstly modeled as a video prediction task. Then a ConvLSTM‐based Seq2Seq model named ConvLSTM‐TM is proposed for predicting the traffic matrix in the next time slot. Based on three real‐world traffic matrix datasets, ConvLSTM‐TM outperforms five deep learning baselines with a lower prediction error. For replication, the dataset, code, and results are publicly available in a Github repository.