Anticipatory Networking in Future Generation Wireless Networks: a Survey

The next trend for information technology is addressing issues before they become problems. This paradigm made modern solutions such as recommendation systems a ubiquitous presence in digital transactions nowadays. Anticipatory networking extends the idea to communication technologies by studying patterns and periodicity in human behaviors and exploiting them for network optimization. This survey collects and analyzes recent papers leveraging context information to forecast the evolution of networking conditions and, in turn, to improve network performance. In particular, we aimed to identifying the main prediction and optimization tools adopted in this body of works and to link them with objectives and constraints of the typical applications and scenarios. Finally, we proposed our considerations about open challenges and research directions to make anticipatory networking part of next generation networks.