UoMo: A Universal Model of Mobile Traffic Forecasting for Wireless Network Optimization

Mobile traffic forecasting allows operators to anticipate network dynamics and performance in advance, offering substantial potential for enhancing service quality and improving user experience. It involves multiple tasks, including long-term prediction, short-term prediction, and generation tasks that do not rely on historical data. By leveraging the different types of mobile network data generated from these tasks, operators can perform a variety of network optimizations and planning activities, such as base station (BS) deployment, resource allocation, energy optimization, etc. However, existing models are often designed for specific tasks and trained with specialized data, and there is a lack of universal models for traffic forecasting across different urban environments. In this paper, we propose a Universal model for Mobile traffic forecasting (UoMo), aiming to handle diverse forecasting tasks of short/long-term predictions and distribution generation across multiple cities to support network planning and optimization. UoMo combines diffusion models and transformers, where various spatio-temporal masks are proposed to enable UoMo to learn intrinsic features of different tasks, and a contrastive learning strategy is developed to capture the correlations between mobile traffic and urban contexts, thereby improving its transfer learning capability. Extensive evaluations on 9 real-world datasets demonstrate that UoMo outperforms current models in various forecasting tasks and zero/few-shot learning. It shows an average accuracy improvement of 27.85%, 18.57%, and 15.6% in long-term prediction, short-term prediction, and generation tasks, respectively, showcasing its strong forecasting capability. We deploy UoMo on China Mobile's JiuTian platform, leveraging the predicted mobile data to optimize live networks. This optimization includes BS deployment, resulting in a 25.3% increase in served users, and BS sleep control, which reduces equipment depreciation by 40.7%. The source code is available online: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UoMo.