Recent
Recent
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42835-022-01314-w
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Received: 10 January 2022 / Revised: 20 October 2022 / Accepted: 8 November 2022 / Published online: 23 November 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers 2022
Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the promising technologies, announced as one of the primary use cases of the fifth-gener-
ation cellular systems (5G). It has many applications that cover many fields, moving from indoor applications, e.g., smart
homes, smart metering, and healthcare applications, to outdoor applications, including smart agriculture, smart city, and
surveillance applications. This produces massive heterogeneous traffic that loads the IoT network and other integrated com-
munication networks, e.g., 5G, which represents a significant challenge in designing IoT networks; especially, with dense
deployment scenarios. To this end, this work considers developing a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based framework for
predicting traffic over IoT networks with dense deployment. This facilitates traffic management and avoids network conges-
tion. The developed AI algorithm is a deep learning model based on the convolutional neural network, which is a lightweight
algorithm to be implemented by a distributed edge computing node, e.g., a fog node, with limited computing capabilities.
The considered IoT model deploys distributed edge computing to enable dense deployment, increase network availability,
reliability, and energy efficiency, and reduce communication latency. The developed framework has been evaluated, and the
results are introduced to validate the proposed prediction model.
2
* Abdelhamied A. Ateya Department of Telecommunication Networks
[email protected] and Data Transmission, St. Petersburg State University
of Telecommunication, St. Petersburg, Russia 193232
Naglaa F. Soliman
3
[email protected] Department of Information Technology, College
of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah bint
Reem Alkanhel
Abdulrahman University, P.O. Box 84428, Riyadh 11671,
[email protected]
Saudi Arabia
Amel A. Alhussan 4
Department of Computer Sciences, College of Computer
[email protected]
and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah bint
Ammar Muthanna Abdulrahman University, P.O. Box 84428, Riyadh 11671,
[email protected] Saudi Arabia
5
Andrey Koucheryavy Department of Applied Probability and Informatics, Peoples’
[email protected] Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University),
Moscow, Russia 117198
1
Department of Electronics and Communications
Engineering, Zagazig University, Zagazig 44519, Sharqia,
Egypt
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massive traffic is the main challenge facing IoT-based cel- Recently, fog computing has been introduced for IoT net-
lular systems [4, 5]. works to provide computing resources to the battery-oper-
By 2025, IoT-connected devices are expected to be ten ated end devices. This achieves many benefits to the IoT
times the current existing number [6]. This increase of networks that can be summarized in the following points
connected devices will introduce IoT connections in many [15, 16]:
applications. Figure 1 illustrates the percentage increase in
IoT connections in 2025 compared with the current existing • Reducing the communication latency,
number in 2021. The percentage increase is introduced per • Reducing the network congestion,
application [7]. • Improving network management operations,
This massive number of applications introduces huge • Providing a path for data offloading,
heterogeneous network traffic that represents a challenge in • Increasing the overall network reliability,
IoT network design; especially, for cellular-based IoT sys- • Increasing the overall network scalability,
tems, e.g., Narrow-band IoT (NB-IoT) [8, 9]. One of the • Increasing the overall network reliability, and
main deployment scenarios supported by 5G systems is the • Increasing the energy efficiency and thus, increases the
dense deployment, and IoT should support dense deploy- battery life of end devices.
ment scenarios and high scalability [10]. This is due to the
recent innovation of sensory manufacturing that results in a The introduction of fog computing facilitates the imple-
surprising number of available sensors. mentation and integration of ML algorithms developed for
Many tools and solutions have been introduced to reduce IoT networks at the edge of the access network [17]. How-
the effect of the plurality and the vast amount of IoT network ever, this integration has a certain level of complexity due to
traffic. Machine learning (ML) is one of the most effective the limited computing resources, e.g., storage, and process-
tools to minimize such traffic effects and maintain network ing, of fog nodes [18]. This work aims to develop a novel
performance at higher levels, even if the network traffic is ML algorithm based on a convolutional neural network
high. ML is used to classify IoT network traffic and predict (CNN) to predict the network traffic in dense deployed IoT
network traffic over a certain period [11–13]. These ML- networks. The algorithm is lightweight to be implemented
based classifications and prediction models are implemented on fog nodes. The main contributions of the work can be
at the core network and application server to facilitate net- summarized in the following points.
work management operations. However, recent proposals
consider developing and implementing such models at the • Design and development of a novel framework of IoT
edge of the access network. network based on distributed fog computing,
Distributed edge computing, e.g., fog computing, is • Design and development of a lightweight ML algorithm
another effective paradigm used for IoT networks to increase based on CNN to predict the network traffic over a cer-
network scalability and enable dense deployment [14]. tain period,
• Training the developed ML algorithm using two datasets,
• Evaluating the performance of the developed framework.
Percentage increase of IoT connections
(2021/2025) The rest of the article is organized as follows: Sect. 2
provides the related works to the developed framework. Sec-
Smart home tion 3 introduces the proposed ML-based framework for IoT
Consumer electronics traffic prediction. Section 4 presents the performance evalu-
Smart vehicles ation of the proposed work.
Wearables
Healthcare
Smart utilities
2 Related Works
Smart manufacturing
The traditional cloud-based IoT architecture cannot meet the
Smart retail demanding requirements of 5G systems, given the growth
Smart buildings of wireless smart devices and communication technolo-
Smart city gies. Recently, the proliferation of network applications has
Others resulted in an explosion of network traffic. Given the number
of connected devices and the real-time nature of many links,
Fig. 1 Expected percentage increase in IoT connections per applica- it is even more critical for IoT networks. Predicting IoT traf-
tion in 2025 compared to 2021 fic in the modern era has garnered considerable attention to
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maximize bandwidth and channel capacity utilization. Net- Moreover, a cross-validated grid model was used to get the
work management necessitates using technology to classify optimum hyper-parameters that achieve the optimum per-
network traffic without the operator's intervention. Numer- formance of the deep learning model. Results indicated that
ous studies have concentrated on accurately classifying net- the developed model classified the network traffic with high
work traffic. performance.
Many existing proposals consider developing ML algo- In [26], the authors investigated the neural network's abil-
rithms for traffic management in IoT networks [19, 20]. ity to classify time series data with Long-Range Dependence
Some existing literature considers ML for IoT traffic classi- of the Internet, using the Hurst exponent as a measure of
fications [21]. Many existing works consider developing ML self-similarity. Synthetic data was generated using Fractional
algorithms to classify IoT traffic at the IoT gateway and thus, Gaussian noise to model the real ones. The trained model
enable the network service providers to detect unauthorized is shown to classify synthetic data derived from the Pareto
traffic and facilitate the network management process. distribution and real-world traffic data. Various cost function
The other part of the existing ML-based works for IoT optimizers and convolutional layers with different numbers
traffic considers predicting network traffic [22]. Such predic- were used for evaluation. Results indicated that individual
tors can provide the future status of the IoT network, over optimizers achieved comparable performance; thus, training
a certain time interval, based on specific parameters, such models with multiple types of optimizers is a good practice
as the previous network status. This section considers the for determining the model with the highest accuracy.
recent exiting literature that considers developing ML algo- In [27], the authors developed a method based on data
rithms for predicting IoT network traffic. The most related conversion and CNN to predict IoT traffic. The CNN is a
works to our developed framework are only included. lightweight that forms the feature map based on the Spa-
In [23], the authors introduced a novel cost-sensitive tio-temporal model. Moreover, another lightweight neural
CNN model for network traffic classifications that facilitates network has been developed to reduce traffic prediction
the feature extraction process of the network traffic. The computations. This neural network has been introduced to
work has mainly considered the problem of data unbalanc- minimize mean errors and improve the accuracy of the pre-
ing during the deep neural network training process. A cost diction. Firstly, data is processed to get the required features
matrix has been used to assign higher values to classes at of the Spatio-temporal. Then, a lightweight prediction algo-
low frequency and low values at high rates. This cost func- rithm is introduced to predict traffic in IoT networks. The
tion achieves higher accuracy in the classification process. algorithm is based on deep learning, and the required param-
The developed model achieved 98% accuracy for two-class eters are optimized at first. The algorithm has been trained
classifications, with only 2% of the network traffic misclas- using a dataset from a real service provider, i.e., Telecom
sified. The authors have not considered the implementation Italia, with 90% of the data for training. The rest, 10%, has
evaluation of the proposed model and the efficiency for been used to test the algorithm. Data introduced in the data-
dense networks with heterogeneous traffic. set has been collected over 50 days, with a data interval of
In [24], the authors considered traffic sensing from social 10 min. This work differs from our developed model, as our
media by extracting traffic-related microblogs from the proposed model has a different CNN structure with a differ-
SinaWeibo platform, representing the most critical way to ent data pre-processing method. Furthermore, our proposed
extract detailed traffic information, such as the location of work is trained using two data sets with a time interval of
a traffic incident. ML models introduce the problem into 30 min. Also, our framework depends on implementing the
a short text classification problem. The authors developed developed algorithm on fog distributed nodes that increases
a deep neural network model to classify microblogs into the prediction process's performance and effect.
two classes; traffic with high significance and others with In [28], the authors developed a CNN model to classify
no critical relevance. A bag-of-words (CBOW) model was Tor traffic. The packet headers are pre-processed to turn a
used to learn word embedding representations from a used portion of the packet, i.e., the first 54 bytes, into the decimal
dataset of three billion unlabeled microblogs. Experiments format and provide them as input to the CNN. The developed
demonstrated that the developed deep neural network model model was trained using the UNB-CIC dataset of Tor traf-
outperforms the support vector machine (SVM) and multi- fic, with 80% of data for training and 20% for testing. The
layer perceptron (MLP) methods. system achieved an accuracy of 99.3% while testing.
In [25], the authors introduced datasets of network pack- In [29], the authors developed a supervised deep-learning
ets to training five considered deep neural networks using algorithm for traffic prediction in IoT networks. The devel-
convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and residual net- oped model is an adaptive gradient boosting (GB) based
works (ResNets). The packets were turned into images used on learning blocks. That developed neural network model
as inputs to the neural networks. Deep learning models were performs the prediction process faster and easier due to the
used to classify network traffic based on CNNs and ResNets. employment of GB. The developed neural network model
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was trained end-to-end using a dataset of real traffic recorded solution based on time series learning algorithms, including
from a mobile operator. The deep learning model was trained gated recurrent unit (GRU-NN) and LSTM. The developed
using a dataset collected from 6214 mobile users, with het- GRU-NN maintains the traffic characteristics of the IoT net-
erogeneous activities over 26 days. The developed model work for an extended period, allowing the system to forecast
predicts for six hours, i.e., six output predicted values, based future traffic based on the recorded traffic. The work con-
on a time interval of one hour. The main advantages of the sidered a gradient boosting training model to improve IoT
developed model include easy training, speed of prediction, traffic prediction accuracy and transfer learning to remove
and accurately predicted results. However, the work had not low traffic captured data barriers. Results indicated that the
considered the implementation of the developed model and model outperforms other existing traffic predictors in statisti-
the computation cost. cal performance evaluation metrics.
In [30], the authors considered the problem of network To provide the novelty of the proposed model compared
traffic change using CNN. The prediction process of net- to existing proposals, Table 1 compares existing proposals
work traffic has turned into a classification process, and a for IoT traffic classification and prediction. The novelty of
developed deep learning model has been introduced for such our developed framework comes from the introduction of
classification problems. The output of the classifier is one fog computing for implementing the CNN model. The pro-
of the network traffic classes. The CNN was trained using posed CNN is a lightweight that is executed on fog-distrib-
the EDU1 dataset, with 80% of data for training, and the uted nodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
other 20% was used for testing. The developed algorithm work to consider implementing a lightweight traffic predic-
was evaluated and validated with an accuracy of 92.6%. tion algorithm at the edge of the access network, i.e., fog
In [31]. The authors developed an intelligent traffic pre- nodes.
diction model with cognitive cashing to enable real-time
prediction of fog-based radio access networks (RANs).
The considered network structure is fog-based RAN, with
a real-time connection to the core network. The traffic flow 3 Proposed System
prediction model was developed using attention-based long
short-term memory (LSTM) and a collaborative filtering- The considered IoT network has the system-level structure
based cognitive caching strategy. The developed model introduced in Fig. 2. The system consists of four levels; the
was trained and tested using a constructed dataset contain- device layer, distributed edge computing layer, access net-
ing 5000 historical logs collected from fog access points. work layer, and the application layer. The distributed edge
The data consists of text data, image data, and video data. computing layer is introduced between IoT end-devices and
The system was evaluated, and the results indicated that the the access network to provide computing capabilities and
developed strategy could accurately predict traffic flow type energy resources within one communication hop range. The
and efficiently lower communication delay. considered edge computing technology is the fog comput-
In [32], the authors considered the IoT network traffic ing paradigm with high deployment flexibility and a level
prediction problem using ML. The prediction process is of mobility. Fog nodes are distributed near IoT end-devices
based on transfer learning. The work provides a prediction with limited computing resources and low mobility.
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Parameter Value
0.0
Dataset (I) Dataset (II)
Fig. 8 MSE of the predicted values using LTP-CNN trained using the
datasets I and II
0.16
0.15
MSE
0.14
0.12
LTP-CNN Traditional CNN
using LTP-CNN significantly differs from that of tradi-
Fig. 9 MSE of the predicted values using LTP-CNN compared with tional CNN, with a P-value of 0.0013. The indicates that
the traditional CNN
the developed LTP-CNN achieves less MSE than tradition
scheme while predicting network traffic, and thus, it pre-
the student's t-test. We consider two main scenarios: in the dicts at higher efficiency than that of the existing models.
first scenario, we compare the MSE of LTP-CNN trained, In order to evaluate the performance of the developed
one time, with the dataset I and the other time with dataset network traffic prediction model in terms of implementa-
II; while the other scenario is introduced to compare MSE tion, we performed a real experiment. The developed LTP-
of the prediction of LTP-CNN with the traditional model. CNN was implemented over a fog node for out previously
Figures 8 and 9 provide the obtained results. developed IoT testbed introduced in [38]. Moreover, we
Figure 8 presents the results of the first scenario, where implemented other existing work deploys traditional neu-
performance of LTP-CNN, for dataset I and dataset II, is ral network for traffic prediction [21]. The specifications
compared. In the first scenario, results indicate no signifi- and the experimental setup parameters are presented in
cant difference between MSE of the LTP-CNN trained by Table 4.
each dataset, at a P-value of 0.1243. This indicates that Figures 10 provides the experimental measures of the
the performance of the developed LTP-CNN in predicting resources utilization of fog node while implementing the
network traffic is very stable and the prediction accuracy developed LTP-CNN and the traditional CNN. It provides
is always very near for all networks. Figure 9 presents the the percentage of utilization of storage resources for both
results of the second scenario, where the performance of considered models. Moreover, the percentage of utilization
LTP-CNN, in traffic prediction, is compared with the tra- of processing resources is presented. The developed model
ditional predicting schemes [21]. In the second scenario, uses less storage resources by an average of 21%, and 18%
results indicate that the MSE of the prediction process less processing resources for implementing the developed
predictor than traditional existing predictors.
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29. Lopez-Martin M, Carro B, Sanchez-Esguevillas A (2019) Neural Zagazig University. He is a member of many scientific communities.
network architecture based on gradient boosting for IoT traffic Abdelhamied is a senior Member of the IEEE and ACM professional
prediction. Future Gener Comput Syst 100:656–673 member. He has been an active member of several international jour-
30. Ko T, Raza SM, Binh DT, Kim M, Choo H (2020). Network pre- nals and conferences, with a contribution as an author, a reviewer, an
diction with traffic gradient classification using convolutional neu- editor, or a member of program committees. His current research inter-
ral networks. In: 2020 14th international conference on ubiquitous ests include machine learning applications in communication networks,
information management and communication (IMCOM). IEEE, 5G/6G communications, Internet of things, Tactile Internet and its
pp 1–4 standardization, and Vehicular communications.
31. Hu L, Miao Y, Yang J, Ghoneim A, Hossain MS, Alrashoud M
(2020) If-rans: intelligent traffic prediction and cognitive caching Naglaa F. Soliman received the
toward fog-computing-based radio access networks. IEEE Wirel B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees
Commun 27(2):29–35 from the faculty of Engineering,
32. Patil SA, Raj LA, Singh BK (2021) Prediction of IoT traffic using Zagazig University, Egypt in
the gated recurrent unit neural network-(GRU-NN-) based predic- 1999, 2004, and 2011, respec-
tive model. Secur Commun Netw. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/ tively. She is currently working
1425732 at department of Information
33. Abdellah AR, Mahmood OAK, Paramonov A, Koucheryavy A Technology, College of Com-
(2019) IoT traffic prediction using multi-step ahead prediction puter and Information Sciences,
with neural network. In: 2019 11th international congress on ultra Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrah-
modern telecommunications and control systems and workshops man University, Riyadh, Saudi
(ICUMT). IEEE, pp 1–4 Arabia since 2015. She has been
34. Carela-Español V, Bujlow T, Barlet-Ros P (2014) Is our ground- a Teaching Staff Member with
truth for traffic classification reliable?. In: International confer- the Department of Electronics
ence on passive and active network measurement. Springer, Cham, and Communications Engineer-
pp 98–108 ing, Faculty of Engineering,
35. Traffic Classification at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Zagazig University, Egypt from 2011 up to 2015. Her current research
(UPC) [Online]. Available: http://www.cba.upc.edu/monitoring/ interests are Digital and Wireless communications OFDM( Channel
traffi c-classification Equalization and Channel Estimation, Signal Processing for 5G and
36. Benson T, Akella A, Maltz DA (2010) Network traffic character- IoT networks Applications), Encoding and compression systems, Opti-
istics of data centers in the wild. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM cal Communication Systems, Power Line Communications, Sensor
SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, pp 267–280. Networks and Applications, Underwater Acoustic Communication
37. UNI2 dataset. [Online]. Available: http://p ages.c s.w
isc.e du/~
tbens Systems, Image Processing:( Enhancement of old images and images
on/IMC10_Data.html acquired under bad illumination conditions, medical images, infrared
38. Muthanna A, Ateya AA, Khakimov A, Gudkova I, Abuarqoub images, restoration of degraded images, restoration of degraded and
A, Samouylov K, Koucheryavy A (2019) Secure and reliable IoT noisy images, multi- channel image processing, image interpolation
networks using fog computing with software-defined networking and resizing, super resolution reconstruction of images, color image
and blockchain. J Sens Actuator Netw 8(1):15 processing, image watermarking, encryption, and data hiding), Signal
Processing: (Spectral Estimation, Wavelet Processing, Signal Separa-
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to tion, and Speech Processing), video processing: (3D Video Watermark-
jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. ing, Steganography, and Encryption), Machine learning and deep learn-
ing, Information Security, Computer vision, Interaction between human
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds and computer, Medical Diagnostic Applications, Biometrics systems,
exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the Cancelable Biometric systems.
author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted
manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of Reem Alkanhel received the B.S. degree in computer sciences from
such publishing agreement and applicable law. King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1996, the M.S. degree
in information technology (computer networks and information secu-
rity) from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia,
Abdelhamied A. Ateya received in 2007, and the PhD degree in information technology (networks and
the B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Electrical communication systems) from Plymouth University, Plymouth, United
Engineering from Zagazig Uni- Kingdom, in 2019. She has been with Princess Nourah bint Abdulrah-
versity, Egypt, in 2010 and 2014, man University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia since 1997. She is currently an
respectively. In 2019, he received associate professor at the college of Computer and Information Sci-
the Ph.D. from Saint—Peters- ences. Her current research interests include communication systems,
burg State University of Tele- networking, IOT, information security, and quality of service.
communications, Russia. He is
currently an Assistant professor
at the department of electronics
and communications engineer-
ing, Faculty of Engineering,
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Amel A. Alhussan received B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in com- school chair “Internet of Things and self-organizing networks” in SUT
puter and information sciences from King Saud University, Saudi Ara- (2010 up to now); Steering committee member of IEEE technically
bia. Her M.Sc. thesis is in software engineering, and her Ph.D. is in co-sponsored series of conferences ICACT and NEW2AN. SG11
Artificial intelligence. She is currently an Associate Professor in the ITU-T vice-chairman 2005 – 2008, 2009 – 2012. WP3/WP4 SG11
Computer Sciences department, College of Computer and Information chairman 2006 – 2012, WP4 SG11 vice-chairman 2015–2016, Chair-
Sciences, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University (PNU), Saudi man of SG11 in Study period 2017- March 2022. Co-founder of Inter-
Arabia. She is worked in her college in various administrative and national Testing Center for new telecommunications technologies at
academic positions. Her research interests include machine learning, ZNIIS under ITU-D competence. Host and technical program commit-
networking, and software engineering. tee’s member of the “Kaleidoscope 2014” at SUT. His scientific areas
of interest are network planning, teletraffic theory, IoT and its
Ammar Muthanna is an Associ- enablers.
ate Professor at the Department
of Telecommunication networks
and Head of SDN Laboratory
(sdnlab.ru), Saint—Petersburg
State University of Telecommu-
nications, Russia. He received
his B.Sc. (2009), M.Sc. (2011)
and as well as Ph.D. (2016)
degrees from Saint—Petersburg
State University of Telecommu-
nications. In 2012/2013 he took
part in Erasmus student program
in the University of Ljubljana in
Faculty of Electrical engineer-
ing. Area of research: wireless
communications, 4G/5G cellular systems, IoT applications, and soft-
ware defined networking.
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