Optimizing Graph Convolutional Networks with Hierarchical Attention and Laplacian Matrix for Urban Wireless Traffic Prediction

With the rapid development of wireless communication networks, using AI to predict complex city-scale network traffic has become a significant research challenge. This paper, based on a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture, proposes a novel wireless network traffic prediction algorithm focused on predicting city-level communication traffic data at an hourly granularity. The algorithm enhances prediction accuracy through two key innovations: first, we introduce a hierarchical attention architecture that combines dynamic and static attention mechanisms. The static attention mechanism, based on wireless channel models, captures fixed spatial relationships between base stations, such as inter-station distances and stable connections. The dynamic attention mechanism, on the other hand, dynamically adjusts to account for time-varying traffic patterns, such as rush hours and holiday effects, enabling the model to adapt to temporal variations in network traffic. These two attention mechanisms are seamlessly integrated within the model through feature concatenation and interactive learning, allowing the model to capture both spatial and temporal characteristics of network traffic simultaneously. Secondly, we innovatively introduce a strategy for adjusting the aggregation iterations of the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based on the Laplacian matrix. By leveraging the spectral information provided by the Laplacian matrix, we dynamically determine the depth of the graph convolutional network, thereby avoiding issues of over-smoothing or underfitting and ensuring stable performance in complex network structures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple dataset, particularly in predicting network traffic data with intricate spatiotemporal characteristics.