A Two-Step Cellular Network Traffic Forecasting Method Integrating Decomposition and Deep Neural Networks Based on Bayesian Joint Parameter Optimization
Pengfei Zhang, Junhuai Li, Dong Ding, Huaijun Wang, Kan Wang, Xiaofan Wang · IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2025
Accurate cellular network traffic prediction is crucial for intelligent network planning and management in 6G. However, the non-stationary characteristics of cellular network traffic present significant challenges when training deep neural networks for traffic forecasting. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage deep learning framework, JO-DPNet, based on Bayesian joint parameter optimization, which integrates data decomposition techniques with Bayesian joint optimization to effectively mitigate the adverse impacts of non-stationarity and error accumulation on prediction accuracy. In the first stage, a data decomposition module uses Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) to decompose the original data into network traffic subset series(TSS), thereby alleviating the negative effects of non-stationarity. In the second stage, a prediction and construction module leverages a bi-directional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) network to extract deep spatial-temporal features from the TSS in a bidirectional manner. A fully connected layer then captures the relationships between the TSS and reconstructs the predicted results into the final output. The JO module employs the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator based Bayesian optimization algorithm(TP-BO) simultaneously determines the optimal VMD mode number k and the hyperparameters of the Bi-LSTM network through probabilistic surrogate model. Extensive experiments on three real-world cellular traffic datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly mitigates the non-stationary characteristics of the traffic data. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, JO-DPNet achieves reductions in MAE by 29%, 3%, and 19% for three type prediction tasks on the Telecom Italia dataset. The source code is available to the public at: https://github.com/VicentZhang259/JO-DPNet.