Research on internet traffic classification techniques using supervised machine learning

Internet traffic classification is vital to the areas of network operation and management. Traditional classification methods such as port mapping and payload analysis are becoming increasingly difficult as newly emerged applications (e.g. Peer-to-Peer) using dynamic port numbers, masquerading techniques and encryption to avoid detection. This paper presents a machine learning (ML) based traffic classification scheme, which offers solutions to a variety of network activities and provides a platform of performance evaluation for the classifiers. The impact of dataset size, feature selection, number of application types and ML algorithm selection on classification performance is analyzed and demonstrated by the following experiments: (1) The genetic algorithm based feature selection can dramatically reduce the cost without diminishing classification accuracy. (2) The chosen ML algorithms can achieve high classification accuracy. Particularly, REPTree and C45 outperform the other ML algorithms when computational complexity and accuracy are both taken into account. (3) Larger dataset and fewer application types would result in better classification accuracy. Finally, early detection with only several initial packets is proposed for real-time network activity and it is proved to be feasible according to the preliminary results.