DC-STGCN: Dual-Channel Based Graph Convolutional Networks for Network Traffic Forecasting

Network traffic forecasting is essential for efficient network management and planning. Accurate long-term forecasting models are also essential for proactive control of upcoming congestion events. Due to the complex spatial-temporal dependencies between traffic flows, traditional time series forecasting models are often unable to fully extract the spatial-temporal characteristics between the traffic flows. To address this issue, we propose a novel dual-channel based graph convolutional network (DC-STGCN) model. The proposed model consists of two temporal components that characterize the daily and weekly correlation of the network traffic. Each of these two components contains a spatial-temporal characteristics extraction module consisting of a dual-channel graph convolutional network (DCGCN) and a gated recurrent unit (GRU). The DCGCN further consists of an adjacency feature extraction module (AGCN) and a correlation feature extraction module (PGCN) to capture the connectivity between nodes and the proximity correlation, respectively. The GRU further extracts the temporal characteristics of the traffic. The experimental results based on real network data sets show that the prediction accuracy of the DC-STGCN model overperforms the existing baseline and is capable of making long-term predictions.