A block regression model for short-term mobile traffic forecasting

Accurate mobile traffic forecast is important for efficient network planning and operations. However, existing traffic forecasting models have high complexity, making the forecasting process slow and costly. In this paper, we analyze some characteristics of mobile traffic such as periodicity, spatial similarity and short term relativity. Based on these characteristics, we propose a Block Regression (BR) model for mobile traffic forecasting. This model employs seasonal differentiation so as to take into account of the temporally repetitive nature of mobile traffic. One of the key features of our BR model lies in its low complexity since it constructs a single model for all base stations. We evaluate the accuracy of BR model based on real traffic data and compare it with the existing models. Results show that our BR model offers equal accuracy to the existing models but has much less complexity.