High-Accuracy Wireless Traffic Prediction: A GP-Based Machine Learning Approach

Wireless traffic prediction can effectively reduce the uncertainty in network demand and supply, and thus is a key enabler of smart management in next-generation wireless networks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to establish a wireless traffic prediction model by applying the Gaussian Process (GP) method based on real 4G traffic data. Our work is two-fold: First, based on the observed wireless traffic patterns, the kernel in our proposed GP model is designed accordingly to capture both the periodic trend and dynamic deviations; second, by leveraging the Toeplitz structure in the covariance matrix, the computational complexity of hyperparameter learning is significantly reduced from O(n
³
) to O(n
²
) and that of inference is reduced from O(n
³
) to O(n \log n), without any loss of prediction accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed GP model can attain up to 97% prediction accuracy, and outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms considerably.