Deep Transfer Learning for Intelligent Cellular Traffic Prediction Based on Cross-Domain Big Data

Machine (deep) learning-enabled accurate traffic modeling and prediction is an indispensable part for future big data-driven intelligent cellular networks, since it can help autonomic network control and management as well as service provisioning. Along this line, this paper proposes a novel deep learning architecture, namely Spatial–Temporal Cross-domain neural Network (STCNet), to effectively capture the complex patterns hidden in cellular data. By adopting a convolutional long short-term memory network as its subcomponent, STCNet has a strong ability in modeling spatial–temporal dependencies. Besides, three kinds of cross-domain datasets are actively collected and modeled by STCNet to capture the external factors that affect traffic generation. As diversity and similarity coexist among cellular traffic from different city functional zones, a clustering algorithm is put forward to segment city areas into different groups, and consequently, a successive inter-cluster transfer learning strategy is designed to enhance knowledge reuse. In addition, the knowledge transferring among different kinds of cellular traffic is also explored with the proposed STCNet model. The effectiveness of STCNet is validated through real-world cellular traffic datasets using three kinds of evaluation metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that STCNet outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms. In particular, the transfer learning based on STCNet brings about 4%~13% extra performance improvements.