Throughput Prediction of 5G Network Based on Trace Similarity for Adaptive Video

Abstract

Predicting throughput is essential to reduce latency in time-critical services like video streaming, which constitutes a significant portion of mobile network traffic. The video player continuously monitors network throughput during playback and adjusts the video quality according to the network conditions. This means that the quality of the video depends on the player’s ability to predict network throughput accurately, which can be challenging in the unpredictable environment of mobile networks. To improve the prediction accuracy, we grouped the throughput trace into clusters taking into account the similarity of their mean and variance. Once we distinguished the similar trace fragments, we built a separate LSTM predictive model for each cluster. For the experiment, we used traffic captured from 5G networks generated by individual user equipment (UE) in fixed and mobile scenarios. Our results show that the prior grouping of the network traces improved the prediction compared to the global model operating on the whole trace.