TD-STGT: A Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer for Mobile Traffic Demand Forecasting

Fine-grained mobile traffic demand forecasting is essential for long-term planning of 5G and future 6G networks, including radio upgrades, site densification, backhaul expansion, and spectrum activation. This paper proposes the Traffic Demand Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer (TD-STGT), a graph neural forecasting framework for predicting changes in wireless mobile traffic demand across fine geographic grids. The framework uses a population-scaled demand proxy developed from crowdsourced mobile measurements and daytime population information. Experiments across five Canadian metropolitan regions show that TD-STGT achieves the best performance in forecasting grid-level demand changes, reaching a ΔR squared of 0.462 and reducing Δ RMSE by 5.7% relative to the strongest baseline. The proposed model provides a practical tool for identifying areas with increasing demand pressure and prioritizing future mobile-network capacity upgrades.