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8, AUGUST 2018
Citywide Cellular Traffic Prediction Based on Densely
Connected Convolutional Neural Networks
Chuanting Zhang, Student Member, IEEE, Haixia Zhang , Senior Member, IEEE,
Dongfeng Yuan, Senior Member, IEEE, and Minggao Zhang
Abstract— With accurate traffic prediction, future cellular
networks can make self-management and embrace intelligent and
efficient automation. This letter devotes itself to citywide cellular
traffic prediction and proposes a deep learning approach to model
the nonlinear dynamics of wireless traffic. By treating traffic
data as images, both the spatial and temporal dependence of cell
traffic are well captured utilizing densely connected convolutional
neural networks. A parametric matrix based fusion scheme is
further put forward to learn influence degrees of the spatial
and temporal dependence. Experimental results show that the
prediction performance in terms of root mean square error can be
significantly improved compared with those existing algorithms.
The prediction accuracy is also validated by using the data sets
of Telecom Italia.
Index Terms— Cellular traffic prediction, big data, deep
learning, intelligent traffic management.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HAS been well known that adopting traffic prediction
I can facilitate resource allocation, enhance energy effi-
ciency, and finally enable intelligent cellular networks [1], [2].
Recently, a lot of work has been done to investigate
the dynamic characteristics of wireless traffic, e.g., non-
stationary and seasonality [3], thus to make an accurate
prediction [4], [5]. Cellular traffic prediction in these work can
be treated as a time series analysis problem, the performance
of which depends on its linear statistical models, such as
AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and
alpha-stable. The pattern of cellular traffic is actually very
complex due to various factors, e.g., user mobility, arrival
pattern and diverse user requirements. It becomes increasingly
clear that those linear models are not suitable for such kind
of applications [6].
To capture the complex and nonlinear dependence hidden
in wireless traffic data, recent advances on machine learning
models [7] have established themselves as strong competitors
to classical statistical models in traffic prediction [8], [9].
[8] proposed a deep belief network based prediction method
to model the long-term dependence of cellular traffic.
Manuscript received March 22, 2018; revised May 3, 2018; accepted
May 16, 2018. Date of publication May 29, 2018; date of current version
August 10, 2018. This work was supported in part by the National Science
Foundation of China for Excellent Young Scholars under Grant 61622111 and
in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant
61671278. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper
and approving it for publication was M. Caleffi. (Corresponding author:
Haixia Zhang.)
The authors are with the Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of
Wireless Communication Technologies, Shandong University, Jinan 250100,
China (e-mail: chuanting.zhang@gmail.com; haixia.zhang@sdu.edu.cn;
dfyuan@sdu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2018.2841832
1558-2558 © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO.
Aiming at exploiting the spatial dependence of different
cells, [9] established a strategy combining auto-encoder and
Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network [10]. However,
the learned features through auto-encoder are lossy represen-
tation of original data [11], which may fail to fully characterize
the spatial dependence of neighboring cells. Besides, the above
methods mainly concentrate on predicting traffic for single
cell. They are computationally expensive if applied to citywide
scale networks, because hundreds even thousands of models
need to be trained simultaneously.
Motivated by the aforementioned problems, this letter
proposes a new method for citywide traffic prediction by
exploiting the powerful capability of deep convolutional
neural network (CNN). More specifically, densely connected
CNN [12], which is the most advanced deep learning archi-
tecture, is utilized to collectively model the spatial and
temporal dependence of traffic in different cells. The spa-
tial dependence is naturally captured by the convolution
operation. Two temporal dependence, i.e., closeness and
period, are modeled using two CNNs and the results are
further fused by a parametric-matrix-based scheme. Experi-
mental results and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed
method is effective and outperforms those existing traffic
prediction methods. The source code is available through
https://github.com/zctzzy/traffic_prediction.
II. DATASET AND S OME K EY O BSERVATIONS
A. Wireless Big Traffic Dataset
The wireless traffic data analyzed in this letter comes from
a large telephony service provider in Europe, Telecom Italia,
as part of the “Big Data Challenge” [13]. The dataset consists
of time series of aggregated cell phone traffic, i.e, short
message service (SMS) and call service, sent or received by
users within a specific area over the city of Milan. The city
is divided into a grid with size of H × W and each square
of the grid is referred to as a “cell”1 . H and W refer to
the number of rows and columns of the grid. In the dataset,
H = W = 100, which means the whole city area is divided
into 100 × 100 cells. The traffic is recorded during the period
from 00:00 11/01/2013 to 00:00 01/01/2014 with a temporal
interval of 10 minutes. At the tth time slot, the in and out
traffic in all cells can be denoted as a tensor Xt ∈ R2×H×W
where (Xt )0,i,j = xin,i,j
t , (Xt )1,i,j = xout,i,j
t . Furthermore,
i,j
xi,j = {xt }, ∀t is denoted as the in/out traffic of cell (i, j)
without distinguishing them unless otherwise specified.
1 This is the best approximation of a cell tower from publicly available
dataset.
ZHANG et al.: CITYWIDE CELLULAR TRAFFIC PREDICTION BASED ON DENSELY CONNECTED CNNs
Fig. 1. Spatial and temporal distribution and correlation of the considered
cellular traffic.
B. Key Observations
After carefully exploring the dataset, we obtain the spatial
and temporal characteristics of the wireless traffic. Details are
demonstrated in Fig. 1.
1) Temporal Domain: Fig. 1a shows the traffic dynamics
of different services, i.e., SMS and Call service, of a given
cell. It can be seen from Fig. 1a that the traffic follows
strong daily patterns associated with a slight dissimilarity
between SMS and phone Calls. For example, the traffic volume
drops at weekends compared with those at working days. The
difference between in and out traffic volume of SMS is much
more obvious than that of phone Calls. Taking SMS traffic as
an example, Fig. 1b displays the average traffic volume ratio
at a time slot gap τ . The ratio  is defined as
1 
T 
H 
W xi,j
= t
, (1)
(T − τ ) × H × W t=1+τ i=1 j=1 xi,j
t−τ
where xi,jt represents the traffic volume of cell (i, j) at the t
th
time slot and T is the number of time slots of the dataset. The
value of this ratio denotes the temporal correlation of wireless
traffic in time series, namely, traffics of adjacent slots are more
relevant than those apart in time.
2) Spatial Domain: Again taking SMS as example, the spa-
tial distribution of the traffic at a given time is demonstrated
in Fig. 1c. It can be seen that the traffic is distributed unevenly
across different cells. This is reasonable, because of the large
population in the city center where there is much more traffic
than the rural areas. The spatial correlation of the traffic data
is measured using a widely used metric [9], i.e., Pearson
correlation coefficient ρ, between a target cell (i, j) and its
neighboring cells (i , j  )
 
cov(xi,j , xi ,j )
ρ= , (2)
σxi,j σxi ,j
where cov(·) represents the covariance operator and σ is
the standard deviation. For demonstration purpose, a region
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Fig. 2. Prediction framework.
with 9 × 9 cells is selected to show the spatial correlations.
The obtained ρ values between the target cell (5, 5) and its
neighboring cells are shown in Fig. 1d. It can be evidently
observed that there indeed exists spatial correlation among
cells. The degree of the correlation depends somewhat on the
distance between cells. For example, though cell (5, 4) and
cell (5, 6) are with the same distance from target cell (5, 5),
their correlation values, which are 0.48 and 0.87, respectively,
still differ a lot.
Based on the above observations, it is clear that an effective
method is needed to collectively capture the spatial and
temporal dependencies of the wireless traffic.
III. P REDICTION M ODEL
In this section, a deep learning approach based on con-
volutional neural networks is proposed to model the spatial-
temporal dependence of the traffic data among different cells.
The framework is illustrated in Fig. 2 which mainly consists
of three components: training data construction, convolutional
learning and parametric matrix based fusion.
A. Training Data Construction
The in and out traffic of each time slot are represented as an
image-like two channel tensor matrix, as shown in the top part
of Fig. 2. A sliding window scheme is used to generate training
and test datasets. Suppose that the traffic volume of tth slot is
the target to be predicted, the intervals before t are divided into
two fragments, i.e., recent time and daily history. Define p as
the length of dependence of closeness, the traffic of recent time
fragment modeling the temporal closeness dependence can be
written as [Xt−p , Xt−(p−1) , · · · , Xt−1 ]. Similarly, define q as
the length of dependence of period, the traffic sampled from
daily history modeling the temporal period dependence can
be expressed as [Xt−q∗24 , Xt−(q−1)∗24 , · · · , Xt−24 ]. Then the
traffic in each fragment is concatenated to be a new tensor
along their first axis. For denotation simplicity, these two
sampled traffic models are denoted as Xc ∈ R2p×H×W and
Xd ∈ R2q×H×W , respectively.
B. Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Networks
As discussed in section II-B.2, traffic of neighboring cells
may be affected by each other. As CNN has shown its
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remarkable ability in hierarchically capturing the spatial struc-
tural information, it is introduced to model the spatial depen-
dence among cells. The convolution with a kernel of size
(k1 , k2 ) can effectively fuse the information of k1 k2 cells
into a high-level representation. Employing CNN, after a
series of convolutions in each layer, the local and global
spatial dependencies of the city wide traffic can be captured.
Considering the fact that the in and out traffic of different
cells are dependent with each other no matter they are adja-
cent or located far apart, the densely connected pattern [12] are
adopted in CNN, which can alleviate the vanishing-gradient
problem and strengthen the feature propagation, and finally can
enhance the prediction efficiency and accuracy. The detailed
network architecture is displayed in Fig. 2, where there are
two networks with shared structure designed, one is used to
model temporal closeness dependence and the other is used
to model temporal period dependence. In the network, there
are L layers and each layer implements a non-linear transfor-
mation fl (·), l = 1, 2, · · · , L, which is a composite function
with three consecutive operations, i.e., Convolution (Conv),
Batch Normalization (BN) and rectified linear units (ReLU).
By calculating the weighted sum of its input, ReLU decides
whether it should be activated or not. For modeling closeness
dependence, with the initial input X0c , at the lth layer, the
output is denoted as
Xlc = fl (X0c ⊕ X1c ⊕ ···⊕ Xl−1
c ), (3)
where ⊕ refers to the concatenation of the feature maps
produced in all preceding layers. Similarly, for modeling the
temporal period dependence, the output at the lth layer can
be expressed as
Xld = fl (X0d ⊕ X1d ⊕ · · · ⊕ Xl−1
d ). (4)
C. Parametric Matrix Based Fusion
From the above analysis, it is known that the traffic of
different cells are related to both closeness and period, but the
relevance varies from each other. To capture this relationship,
a parametric matrix based scheme is proposed to fuse the
features of closeness and period, as shown in the bottom
part of Fig. 2. A convolution layer is separately added on
top of the Lth layer of the networks to get the features for
the parametric matrix based fusion scheme. Suppose that the
outputs of the two convolution layers are XL+1 and XL+1 , For lengths of dependent sequences, p and q are both set to
c d
respectively. After fusion, we have
Xo = Wc  XL+1
c + Wd  XL+1 , (5)
d
where  is Hadamard product, Wc and Wd are learnable
parameters charactering the relationship between closeness,
period and the wireless traffic. The final output after an
activation writes
X̂t = σ(Xo ), (6)
where σ(·) denotes the sigmoid function. The proposed deep
learning model can be easily trained through minimizing the
Frobenius norm between the predicted value and the ground
truth value of the tth slot
L(θ) = arg minX̂t − Xt 22 , (7)
θ played in Fig. 3. RMSE without parametric matrix based
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 22, NO. 8, AUGUST 2018
Fig. 3. Overall performance on two kinds of wireless traffic.
where θ denotes the parameter set of the proposed prediction
model.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS
In this section, the data is firstly preprocessed for model
training, and then the overall performance of the proposed
prediction scheme is evaluated and the predicted results are
given.
A. Preprocessing and Parameter Settings
During the 10 minutes time interval of the original dataset,
a large proportion of the cell traffic is zero, which makes the
data very sparse. Besides, resource planning in 10 minutes
level is a non-trivial task and may result in unstable net-
works or excessive overhead. Thus in this letter, the traffic is
aggregated per hour. As sigmoid function is used to activate the
outputs of the proposed model, the traffic is scaled into [0,1]
using Min-Max normalization. In evaluation, the predicted
values are rescaled back to the normal values and compared
with the ground truth. In addition, the traffic from the last
7 days is selected as the test data, and all traffic before is set
to be training data.
Both the two deep networks are trained by the widely
used optimization technique, Adam, with a mini-batch 32 for
100 epochs. The initial learning rate is set to 0.01, and is
divided by 10 at 50% and 75% of the total number of training
epochs. All convolution layers have 32 filters with size 3 × 3
except for the last layer, which has 2 filters with size 3 × 3.
be 3. The root mean square error (RMSE) is adopted as the
evaluation metric and defined as

1 H×W
RMSE = (yˆi − yi )2 , (8)
H × W i=1
where yˆi is the predicted value of ith cell and yi is the ground
truth.
B. Overall Performance
To validate the effectiveness of the proposed deep learn-
ing based cellular traffic prediction method, experiments
are carried out with two types of datasets, i.e., SMS
and Call. As a performance measurement, RMSE of the
prediction, denoted as Proposed-F, is calculated and dis-
ZHANG et al.: CITYWIDE CELLULAR TRAFFIC PREDICTION BASED ON DENSELY CONNECTED CNNs
Fig. 4. The change of training loss with each epoch.
Fig. 5. Prediction results of a random selected cell.
fusion scheme (XL+1 c + XL+1
p ), denoted as Proposed, is also
included in Fig. 3. It can be observed that the fusion scheme
can enhance the performance in terms of RMSE, which
means that learning the weights of closeness and period can
better describe their function in traffic prediction. For com-
parison purpose, three existing algorithms, Historical Average
value (HA), ARIMA and LSTM, are adopted as baselines as
they have been widely used for traffic prediction in current
research work [4], [9]. The obtained RMSE shows that the
proposed method achieves the most accurate prediction. This
is because the spatial and temporal dependences of cellular
traffic among different cells are collectively modeled through
utilizing CNNs. Moreover, the RMSE values on the Call
dataset are relatively lower than that of the SMS dataset, as the
pattern hidden in the Call dataset is more “regular”, as seen
from Fig. 1a, than the SMS dataset, which in turn makes it
easier to be learned by the deep model. It should be noted that
for real communication systems re-training is needed to cope
with the new coming data.
To show the convergence speed of the proposed method,
the training loss after each epoch is given in Fig. 4. It is shown
that the loss decreases quickly during the first 20 epochs and
then gradually converges to a stable status after 40 epochs,
indicating that the training process of the proposed method is
time efficient.
C. Prediction Results
Finally, both the predicted in and out traffic of a ran-
domly selected cell are given and compared with the ground
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truth values. The comparisons are shown in Fig. 5. It can be
seen that the prediction results well match the trend of ground
truth even when the traffic becomes unstable during the time
slots from 130th to 160th . The peaks of both in and out traffic
can be effectively captured and predicted.
V. C ONCLUSION
This letter investigates the spatial and temporal dependence
of traffic among different cells and has proposed a deep
learning approach to collectively model these two kinds of
dependencies for traffic prediction. To exactly model the
influence degree of these two dependences, a parametric
matrix based fusion scheme has been introduced. It has
been shown that by treating traffic data as images, the city-
wide traffic can be efficiently predicted. Experimental results
have demonstrated that the proposed CNN based approach
obtains better performance in terms of RMSE when com-
pared with some existing methods. It should be noted that
to achieve the best performance with the proposed approach
large amount of training data is needed. The code is available
at https://github.com/zctzzy/traffic_prediction.
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