Network Traffic Prediction in Industrial Internet of Things Backbone Networks: A Multi-Task Learning Mechanism

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), as a common industrial application of Internet of Things (IoT), has been widely deployed in recent years. End-to-end network traffic is an essential information for many network security and management functions. This paper investigates the issues of IIoT-oriented backbone network traffic prediction. Predicting the traffic of IIoT backbone networks is intractable because of the large number of prior network traffic information, which needs to consume expensive network resources for sampling. Motivated by that, we propose an effective prediction mechanism using Multi-Task Learning (MTL) which is a special paradigm of transfer learning. A deep learning architecture constructed by MTL and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is designed. This deep architecture takes advantage of link loads as additional information to improve prediction accuracy. We provide a theoretical analysis for the MTL mechanism. The effectiveness is evaluated by implementing our mechanism on real network.