Determination of voice traffic busy hour and traffic forecasting in Global System of Mobile Communication (GSM) in Nigeria

The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a major telecommunications system in Nigeria. Therefore, millions of Nigerians are relying on it for daily businesses and living. It is a common knowledge that GSM has not satisfied the user-perceived Quality of Service (QoS) in Nigeria. One of the ways to solve this is to understand the traffic pattern in Nigeria. In this work, we establish the traffic pattern over 24 hours in Nigeria for a period of 5 months, determine the busy hour and also develop a model for traffic forecasting, using an operator switch in the north-central part of Nigeria with 6 Base Station Controllers (BSC). The BSCs are named BSC A-BSC F. The busy hour of a system is the time when the system processes the highest traffic in a day. Busy hour measurements are used to determine how robust a system is. Hence in GSM, the measurements taken at busy hour are used for proper equipment dimensioning. The data used in this paper was obtained from Network Management System (NMS) counter for a period of 5 months. The obtained data was analysed using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The busy hour was observed to be 20:00 on five of the BSCs studied and 14:00 on one.