Mobile traffic forecasting using a combined FFT/LSTM strategy in SDN networks

Over the last few years, networks’ infrastructures are experiencing a profound change initiated by Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In such networks, avoiding the risk of service degradation increasingly involves predicting the evolution of metrics impacting the Quality of Service (QoS), in order to implement appropriate preventive actions. Recurrent neural networks, in particular Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, already demonstrated their efficiency in predicting time series, in particular in networking, thanks to their ability to memorize long sequences of data. In this paper, we propose an improvement that increases their accuracy by combining them with filters, especially the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), in order to better extract the characteristics of the time series to be predicted. The proposed approach allows improving prediction performance significantly, while presenting an extremely low computational complexity at run-time compared to classical techniques such as Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), which requires costly online operations.