Telecommunication networks play a critical role in modern society. With the arrival of 5G networks, these systems are becoming even more diversified, integrated, and intelligent. Traffic forecasting is one of the key components in such a system, however, it is particularly challenging due to the complex spatial-temporal dependency. In this work, we consider this problem from the aspect of a cellular network and the interactions among its base stations. We thoroughly investigate the characteristics of cellular network traffic and shed light on the dependency complexities based on data collected from a densely populated metropolis area. Specifically, we observe that the traffic shows both dynamic and static spatial dependencies as well as diverse cyclic temporal patterns. To address these complexities, we propose an effective deep-learning-based approach, namely, Spatio-Temporal Hybrid Graph Convolutional Network (STHGCN). It employs GRUs to model the temporal dependency, while capturing the complex spatial dependency through a hybrid-GCN from three perspectives: spatial proximity, functional similarity, and recent trend similarity. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world traffic datasets collected from telecommunication networks. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in that it consistently outperforms both classical methods and state-of-the-art deep learning models, while being more robust and stable.
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