Weixi Gu

Traffic forecasting has been regarded as the basis for many intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications, including but not limited to trip planning, road traffic control, and vehicle routing. Various forecasting methods have been proposed in the literature, including statistical models, shallow machine learning models, and deep learning models. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as state-of-the-art traffic forecasting solutions because they are well suited for traffic systems with graph structures. This survey aims to introduce the research progress on graph neural networks for traffic forecasting and the research trends observed from the most recent studies. Furthermore, this survey summarizes the latest open-source datasets and code resources for sharing with the research community. Finally, research challenges and opportunities are proposed to inspire follow-up research.

Internet traffic prediction has been considered a research topic and the basis for intelligent network management and planning, e.g., elastic network service provision and content delivery optimization. Various methods have been proposed in the literature for Internet traffic prediction, including statistical, machine learning and deep learning methods. However, most of the existing approaches are trained and deployed in a centralized approach, without considering the realistic scenario in which multiple parties are concerned about the prediction process and the prediction model can be trained in a distributed approach. In this study, a distributed multi-agent learning framework is proposed to fill the research gap and predict Internet traffic in a distributed approach, in which each agent trains a base prediction model and the individual models are further aggregated with the cooperative interaction process. In the numerical experiments, two sophisticated deep learning models are chosen as the base prediction model, namely, long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). The numerical experiments demonstrate that the GRU model trained with five agents achieves state-of-the-art performance on a real-world Internet traffic dataset collected in a campus backbone network in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE).