Network traffic prediction based on PSO-LightGBM-TM

Network traffic prediction is critical in wireless network management by allowing a good estimate of the traffic trend, which is also an important approach for detecting traffic anomalies in order to enhance network security. Deep-learning-based method has been widely adopted to predict network traffic matrix (TM) though with the main drawbacks in high complexity and low efficiency. In this paper, we propose a traffic prediction model based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and LightGBM (PSO-LightGBM-TM), which optimizes the LightGBM parameters for each network flow by PSO so that LightGBM can adapt to each of the network traffic flow. Compared with existing commonly used deep learning models, our model has a more straightforward structure and yet outperforms existing deep learning models. Sufficient comparison tests on three real network traffic datasets, Abilene, GÉANT, and CERNET have been conducted, and the results show that our model provides more accurate results and higher prediction efficiency.