Short-Term Traffic Forecasting in a Campus-Wide Wireless Network

Our goal is to characterize the traffic load in an IEEE802.11 infrastructure. This can be beneficial in many domains, including coverage planning, resource reservation, network monitoring for anomaly detection, and producing more accurate simulation models. The key issue that drives this study is traffic forecasting at each wireless access point (AP) in an hourly timescale. We conducted an extensive measurement study of wireless users on a major university campus using the IEEE802.11 wireless infrastructure. We propose several traffic models that take into account the periodicity and recent traffic history for each AP and present a time-series forecasting methodology. Finally, we build and evaluate these forecasting algorithms and discuss our findings.