5G Traffic Forecasting: If Verticals and Mobile Operators Cooperate

In 5G research, it is traditionally assumed that vertical industries (a.k.a verticals) set the performance requirements for the services they want to offer to mobile users, and the mobile operators alone are in charge of orchestrating their resources so as to meet such requirements. Motivated by the observation that successful orchestration requires reliable traffic predictions, in this paper we investigate the effects of having the verticals, instead of the mobile operators, performing such predictions. Leveraging a real-world, large-scale, crowd-sourced trace, we find that involving the verticals in the prediction process reduces the prediction errors and improves the quality of the resulting orchestration decisions.