Greg Sidebottom

Sajal Saha, Anwar Haque, Greg Sidebottom

Real-world IP network traffic is susceptible to external and internal factors such as new internet service integration, traffic migration, internet application, etc. Due to these factors, the actual internet traffic is non-linear and challenging to analyze using a statistical model for future prediction. In this paper, we investigated and evaluated the performance of different statistical prediction models for real IP network traffic; and showed a significant improvement in prediction using the rolling prediction technique. Initially, a set of best hyper-parameters for the corresponding prediction model is identified by analyzing the traffic characteristics and implementing a grid search algorithm based on the minimum Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Then, we performed a comparative performance analysis among AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA), SARIMA with eXogenous factors (SARIMAX), and Holt-Winter for single-step prediction. The seasonality of our traffic has been explicitly modeled using SARIMA, which reduces the rolling prediction Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE) by more than 4% compared to ARIMA (incapable of handling the seasonality). We further improved traffic prediction using SARIMAX to learn different exogenous factors extracted from the original traffic, which yielded the best rolling prediction results with a MAPE of 6.83%. Finally, we applied the exponential smoothing technique to handle the variability in traffic following the Holt-Winter model, which exhibited a better prediction than ARIMA (around 1.5% less MAPE). The rolling prediction technique reduced prediction error using real Internet Service Provider (ISP) traffic data by more than 50\% compared to the standard prediction method.

Sajal Saha, Anwar Haque, Greg Sidebottom

Effective internet traffic prediction in smaller ISP networks is challenged by limited data availability. This paper explores this issue using transfer learning and data augmentation techniques with two LSTM-based models, LSTMSeq2Seq and LSTMSeq2SeqAtn, initially trained on a comprehensive dataset provided by Juniper Networks and subsequently applied to smaller datasets. The datasets represent real internet traffic telemetry, offering insights into diverse traffic patterns across different network domains. Our study revealed that while both models performed well in single-step predictions, multi-step forecasts were challenging, particularly in terms of long-term accuracy. In smaller datasets, LSTMSeq2Seq generally outperformed LSTMSeq2SeqAtn, indicating that higher model complexity does not necessarily translate to better performance. The models' effectiveness varied across different network domains, reflecting the influence of distinct traffic characteristics. To address data scarcity, Discrete Wavelet Transform was used for data augmentation, leading to significant improvements in model performance, especially in shorter-term forecasts. Our analysis showed that data augmentation is crucial in scenarios with limited data. Additionally, the study included an analysis of the models' variability and consistency, with attention mechanisms in LSTMSeq2SeqAtn providing better short-term forecasting consistency but greater variability in longer forecasts. The results highlight the benefits and limitations of different modeling approaches in traffic prediction. Overall, this research underscores the importance of transfer learning and data augmentation in enhancing the accuracy of traffic prediction models, particularly in smaller ISP networks with limited data availability.