Can LLMs Forecast Internet Traffic from Social Media?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Langlet, Jonatan, Scazzariello, Mariano, Luciani, Flavio, Burocchi, Marta, Kostić, Dejan, Chiesa, Marco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Langlet, Jonatan
Scazzariello, Mariano
Luciani, Flavio
Burocchi, Marta
Kostić, Dejan
Chiesa, Marco
author_facet Langlet, Jonatan
Scazzariello, Mariano
Luciani, Flavio
Burocchi, Marta
Kostić, Dejan
Chiesa, Marco
contents Societal events shape the Internet's behavior. The death of a prominent public figure, a software launch, or a major sports match can trigger sudden demand surges that overwhelm peering points and content delivery networks. Although these events fall outside regular traffic patterns, forecasting systems still rely solely on those patterns and therefore miss these critical anomalies. Thus, we argue for socio-technical systems that supplement technical measurements with an active understanding of the underlying drivers, including how events and collective behavior shape digital demands. We propose traffic forecasting using signals from public discourse, such as headlines, forums, and social media, as early demand indicators. To validate our intuition, we present a proof-of-concept system that autonomously scrapes online discussions, infers real-world events, clusters and enriches them semantically, and correlates them with traffic measurements at a major Internet Exchange Point. This prototype predicted between 56-92% of society-driven traffic spikes after scraping a moderate amount of online discussions. We believe this approach opens new research opportunities in cross-domain forecasting, scheduling, demand anticipation, and society-informed decision making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20123
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can LLMs Forecast Internet Traffic from Social Media?
Langlet, Jonatan
Scazzariello, Mariano
Luciani, Flavio
Burocchi, Marta
Kostić, Dejan
Chiesa, Marco
Networking and Internet Architecture
Societal events shape the Internet's behavior. The death of a prominent public figure, a software launch, or a major sports match can trigger sudden demand surges that overwhelm peering points and content delivery networks. Although these events fall outside regular traffic patterns, forecasting systems still rely solely on those patterns and therefore miss these critical anomalies. Thus, we argue for socio-technical systems that supplement technical measurements with an active understanding of the underlying drivers, including how events and collective behavior shape digital demands. We propose traffic forecasting using signals from public discourse, such as headlines, forums, and social media, as early demand indicators. To validate our intuition, we present a proof-of-concept system that autonomously scrapes online discussions, infers real-world events, clusters and enriches them semantically, and correlates them with traffic measurements at a major Internet Exchange Point. This prototype predicted between 56-92% of society-driven traffic spikes after scraping a moderate amount of online discussions. We believe this approach opens new research opportunities in cross-domain forecasting, scheduling, demand anticipation, and society-informed decision making.
title Can LLMs Forecast Internet Traffic from Social Media?
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20123