A Meta-Learning Scheme for Adaptive Short-Term Network Traffic Prediction

Network traffic prediction is a fundamental prerequisite for dynamic resource provisioning in wireline and wireless networks, but is known to be challenging due to non-stationarity and due to its burstiness and self-similar nature. The prediction of network traffic at the user level is particularly challenging, because the traffic characteristics emerge from a complex interaction of user level and application protocol behavior. In this work we address the problem of predicting the network traffic at the user level over a short horizon, motivated by its applications in cellular scheduling. Motivated by recent works on robust adversarial learning, we treat the prediction problem for non-stationary traffic in an adversarial context, and propose a meta-learning scheme that consists of a set of predictors, each optimized to predict a particular kind of traffic, and of a master policy that is trained for choosing the best fit predictor dynamically based on recent prediction performance, using deep reinforcement learning. We evaluate the proposed meta-learning scheme on a variety of traffic traces consisting of video and non-video traffic. Our results show that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art predictors, and can adapt to before unseen traffic without the need for retraining the individual predictors.