Using the (Crystal) Ball: Forecasting Network Traffic Peaks with Football Events

Mobile network traffic forecasting is a fundamental building block for key management tasks such as resources allocation. In particular, being able to predict traffic volume peaks is of primary importance for a correct network operation. This paper proposes to exploit exogenous inputs to predict such peaks, focusing in particular on football matches. We show with an analysis conducted on 4 of the major cities in Italy for a period of 6 months that volume traffic peaks are strongly correlated with the occurrence of football matches between specific teams and we propose a methodology to exploit the football calendar to forecast traffic peaks. The proposed forecasting frameworks allows to predict more than 50 % of the peaks, improving the forecasting performance compared to a traffic signature based approach and being able to forecast the maximum traffic volume with an average overestimation below +10% of the actual value.