Data-Augmentation-Based Cellular Traffic Prediction in Edge-Computing-Enabled Smart City

With the massive deployment of 5G cellular infrastructures, traffic prediction has become an indispensable part of the cellular resource management system in order to provide reliable and fast communication services that can meet the increasing quality-of-service requirements of smart city. A promising approach for handling this problem is to introduce intelligent methods to implement a highly effective and efficient cellular traffic prediction model. Meanwhile, integrating the multiaccess edge computing framework in 5G cellular networks facilitates the application of intelligent traffic prediction models by enabling their implementation at the network edge. However, the data shortage and privacy issues may still be obstacles for training a robust and accurate prediction model at the edge. To address these issues, we propose a data-augmentation-based cellular traffic prediction model (ctGAN-S2S), where an effective data augmentation submodel based on generative adversarial networks is proposed to improve the prediction performance while protecting data privacy, and a long-short-term-memory-based sequence-to-sequence submodel is used to achieve the flexible multistep cellular traffic prediction. The experimental results on a real-world city-scale cellular traffic dataset reveal that our ctGAN-S2S model achieves up to 48.49% improvement of the prediction accuracy compared to four typical reference models.