Learning probabilistic models of cellular network traffic with applications to resource management

Given the exponential increase in broadband cellular traffic it is imperative that scalable traffic measurement and monitoring techniques be developed to aid various resource management methods. In this paper, we use a machine learning technique to learn the underlying conditional dependence and independence structure in the base station traffic loads to show how such probabilistic models can be used to reduce the traffic monitoring efforts. The broad goal is to exploit the model to develop a spatial sampling technique that estimates the loads on all the base stations based on actual measurements only on a small subset of base stations. We take special care to develop a sparse model that focuses on capturing only key dependences. Using trace data collected in a network of 400 base stations we show the effectiveness of this approach in reducing the monitoring effort. To understand the tradeoff between the accuracy and monitoring complexity better, we also study the use of this modeling approach on real applications. Two applications are studied — energy saving and opportunistic scheduling. They show that load estimation via such modeling is quite effective in reducing the monitoring burden.