Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) is everywhere, from medical diagnosis based on image recognition to
navigation for self-driving cars. ML has been evolving as a discipline to the point that it
currently allows wireless networks to learn and extract knowledge by interacting with data.
Preliminary interest and discussions about the feasibility of evolving 5G standards with the
assistance of ML protocols have captured the attention and imagination of engineers and
researchers across the globe. We have witnessed how mobile and wireless systems have become
an essential part of social infrastructure, mobilizing our daily lives and facilitating the digital
economy in multiple ways. The deployment of 5G wireless communication systems is projected
to begin in 2020. With new scenarios, new technologies, and new network architectures, the
traffic management for 5G networks will present significant technical challenges. In recent years,
AI technologies, especially ML technologies, have demonstrated significant success in many
application domains, suggesting their potential to help solve the problem of 5G traffic
management.A promising direction to tackle the challenges described above is to adapt artificial
intelligence (AI) technologies to analyze and manage the traffic of 5G networks from network
data. AI technologies will not only reduce manual interventions in network traffic management,
but also enable better network performance, better reliability, and more adaptive systems by
drawing new insights from the networks and predicting the network traffic conditions and the
users’ behavior, enabling smarter decisions in an autonomous fashion. ML is great for complex
problems where existing solutions require a lot of hand-tuning, or for problems which there is no
solution at all using a traditional approach. These problems can be tackled by learning from data,
replacing conventional software containing long rule lists, with ML routines that automatically
learn from previous data. An important difference of ML over traditional cognitive algorithms is
automatic feature extraction, by which expensive hand-crafted feature engineering can be
waived. Broadly speaking, an ML task can detect anomalies, predict future scenarios, adapt to
fluctuating environments, get insights of complex problems with large amounts of data, and in
general, discover the patterns that a human can miss.There are multiple parameters in mobile and
wireless networks, and some of them are set using heuristic calculations because no solid closed
form solution exists for their value, or because a proper measurement campaign may be
prohibitively expensive. For these kinds of problems, an ML algorithm (e.g., a neural network
(NN)) can contribute by predicting the parameters and estimating functions based on the
available data .