Mobile Network Traffic Prediction Using High Order Markov Chains Trained at Multiple Granularity

Over the years, the need for communication networks capable of providing an ever-increasing set of services has grown. In order to satisfy user requirements and provide guarantees of reliability of the network itself, efficient techniques are required for analysis, evaluation and design. For this reason, the need arises to have models able to represent the peculiar characteristics of network traffic and to produce reliable predictions of its behavior in an adequate period of time. Therefore, network traffic prediction plays an important role by supporting many practical applications, ranging from network planning and provisioning to security. Several works so far have focused on building app-specific models. However, this choice produces multiple models that need to be properly managed and deployed across network devices. Therefore, in this paper, we explore different training strategies to reduce the number of models, adopting the Markov Chains to model mobile video apps traffic at packet-level. We discuss and experimentally evaluate the prediction effectiveness of the proposed approaches by comparing the performance of app models with models trained on a specific category of video apps and a model trained on the mix of all video traffic.