Federated Learning‐Based Mobile Traffic Prediction in Satellite‐Terrestrial Integrated Networks

ABSTRACT Introduction With the development and integration of satellite and terrestrial networks, mobile traffic prediction has become more important than before, which is the basis for service provision and resource scheduling when supporting various vertical applications. However, existing traffic prediction methods, especially deep learning‐based methods, require massive data for model training. Due to data privacy concerns, mobile traffic data are not easily shared among different parties, making it difficult to obtain a precise prediction model. Methods To mitigate the data leakage risk, a federated learning framework is proposed in this study for mobile traffic prediction in satellite‐terrestrial integrated networks to achieve a tradeoff between data privacy and prediction accuracy. In the proposed framework, local models are trained in base stations on the ground, and a global model is aggregated in the satellite edge server in space. Results A deep learning‐based prediction model with an adaptive graph convolutional network (AGCN) and long short‐term memory (LSTM) modules is proposed and validated in numerical experiments, which achieves the lowest prediction error with a real‐world traffic dataset when compared with other graph neural network (GNN) variants in the federated learning setting. Conclusion Numerical experiments with a real‐world mobile traffic dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which outperforms other GNN variants with lower prediction errors.