Network traffic prediction with Attention-based Spatial–Temporal Graph Network

Network traffic prediction plays a significant role in network management. Previous network traffic prediction methods mainly focus on the temporal relationship between network traffic, and used time series models to predict network traffic, ignoring the spatial information contained in traffic data. Therefore, the prediction accuracy is limited, especially in long-term prediction. To improve the prediction accuracy of the dynamic network traffic in the long term, we propose an Attention-based Spatial-Temporal Graph Network (ASTGN) model for network traffic prediction to better capture both the temporal and spatial relations between the network traffic. Specifically, in ASTGN, we exploit an encoder–decoder architecture, where the encoder encodes the input network traffic and the decoder outputs the predicted network traffic sequences, integrating the temporal and spatial information of the network traffic data through the Spatio-Temporal Embedding module. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method ASTGN in long-term prediction.