Cellular Traffic Load Prediction with LSTM and Gaussian Process Regression

Accurate cellular traffic load prediction is a pre-requisite for efficient and automatic network planning and management. Considering diverse users' activities at different locations and times, it is technically challenging to characterize the network resource demands at different time scales via traditional prediction methods. In this paper, we propose to combine the long short-term memory (LSTM) and Gaussian process regression (GPR) to achieve accurate single-cell level cellular traffic prediction, using the open Milan cellular traffic dataset provided by Telecom Italia. Firstly, the dominant periodic components of the cellular data are extracted, and then the small components are fed to the LSTM network. To further improve the prediction accuracy, GPR is used to recover the residual components. Extensive experiments are conducted based on the dataset, and it is shown that the proposed LSTM-GPR scheme outperforms the benchmark schemes, especially for a relatively long time and burst traffic prediction.