A Latent Diffusion-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Short-Term Smart Grid Traffic Prediction

Accurate short-term prediction of network service traffic is essential for communication resource allocation and proactive fault warning in smart grids. However, smart grid service traffic is characterized by nonlinear fluctuations, strong spatio-temporal coupling, and considerable uncertainty, making it difficult for existing methods to capture long-range dependencies, adapt to dynamic topological relationships, and reflect prediction risks. To address these issues, this work develops a deep learning framework that integrates a spatio-temporal Transformer with a diffusion mechanism. The spatio-temporal Transformer extracts temporal evolution patterns and spatial logical correlations from historical traffic matrices, while the diffusion module improves robustness to abrupt traffic variations through latent uncertainty modeling. Furthermore, attention-guided recurrent units are used to generate stable multi-step forecasting sequences. Experiments on a real-world network dataset show that, compared with mainstream benchmark models, the proposed framework reduces Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Root Relative Squared Error (RRSE) by 46.62%, 47.05%, and 44.18%, respectively. These results indicate that the framework improves prediction accuracy and stability while alleviating error accumulation in long-horizon forecasting, thereby providing reliable technical support for smart grid network management.