MobiGPT: A Foundation Model for Mobile Wireless Networks
This addresses the need for efficient and scalable forecasting in mobile networks for operators, though it appears incremental as it builds on foundation model concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of forecasting mobile data types like traffic and user behavior in wireless networks by introducing MobiGPT, a foundation model that improves accuracy by up to 27.37% compared to existing models and shows strong zero/few-shot performance.
With the rapid development of mobile communication technologies, future mobile networks will offer vast services and resources for commuting, production, daily life, and entertainment. Accurate and efficient forecasting of mobile data (e.g., cell traffic, user behavior, channel quality) helps operators monitor network state changes, orchestrate wireless resources, and schedule infrastructure and users, thereby improving supply efficiency and service quality. However, current forecasting paradigms rely on customized designs with tailored models for exclusive data types. Such approaches increase complexity and deployment costs under large-scale, heterogeneous networks involving base stations, users, and channels. In this paper, we design a foundation model for mobile data forecasting, MobiGPT, with a unified structure capable of forecasting three data types: base station traffic, user app usage, and channel quality. We propose a soft-prompt learning method to help the model understand features of different data types, and introduce a temporal masking mechanism to guide the model through three forecasting tasks: short-term prediction, long-term prediction, and distribution generation, supporting diverse optimization scenarios. Evaluations on real-world datasets with over 100,000 samples show that MobiGPT achieves accurate multi-type forecasting. Compared to existing models, it improves forecasting accuracy by 27.37%, 20.08%, and 7.27%, reflecting strong generalization. Moreover, MobiGPT exhibits superior zero/few-shot performance in unseen scenarios, with over 21.51% improvement, validating its strong transferability as a foundation model.