Network Traffic Prediction Incorporating Prior Knowledge for an Intelligent Network

Network traffic prediction is an important tool for the management and control of IoT, and timely and accurate traffic prediction models play a crucial role in improving the IoT service quality. The degree of burstiness in intelligent network traffic is high, which creates problems for prediction. To address the problem faced by traditional statistical models, which cannot effectively extract traffic features when dealing with inadequate sample data, in addition to the poor interpretability of deep models, this paper proposes a prediction model (fusion prior knowledge network) that incorporates prior knowledge into the neural network training process. The model takes the self-similarity of network traffic as a priori knowledge, incorporates it into the gating mechanism of the long short-term memory neural network, and combines a one-dimensional convolutional neural network with an attention mechanism to extract the temporal features of the traffic sequence. The experiments show that the model can better recover the characteristics of the original data. Compared with the traditional prediction model, the proposed model can better describe the trend of network traffic. In addition, the model produces an interpretable prediction result with an absolute correction factor of 76.4%, which is at least 10% better than the traditional statistical model.