Open Access
Generative adversarial networks for generating synthetic features for Wi-Fi signal quality
Author(s) -
Mauro Castelli,
Luca Manzoni,
Tatiane Espindola,
Aleš Popovič,
Andrea De Lorenzo
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0260308
Subject(s) - computer science , synthetic data , quality (philosophy) , generative grammar , generative model , field (mathematics) , service (business) , signal (programming language) , portfolio , quality of service , adversarial system , telecommunications , artificial intelligence , data mining , data science , machine learning , philosophy , mathematics , economy , epistemology , economics , financial economics , pure mathematics , programming language
Wireless networks are among the fundamental technologies used to connect people. Considering the constant advancements in the field, telecommunication operators must guarantee a high-quality service to keep their customer portfolio. To ensure this high-quality service, it is common to establish partnerships with specialized technology companies that deliver software services in order to monitor the networks and identify faults and respective solutions. A common barrier faced by these specialized companies is the lack of data to develop and test their products. This paper investigates the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs), which are state-of-the-art generative models, for generating synthetic telecommunication data related to Wi-Fi signal quality. We developed, trained, and compared two of the most used GAN architectures: the Vanilla GAN and the Wasserstein GAN (WGAN). Both models presented satisfactory results and were able to generate synthetic data similar to the real ones. In particular, the distribution of the synthetic data overlaps the distribution of the real data for all of the considered features. Moreover, the considered generative models can reproduce the same associations observed for the synthetic features. We chose the WGAN as the final model, but both models are suitable for addressing the problem at hand.