Summary
Accurate application layer classification of Internet traffic has been a necessary requirement for various regulatory, control, and operational purposes of Internet service provider (ISP). Due to the dynamic and ever evolving nature of Internet applications generating a diverse mixture of Internet traffic, it has been necessary to apply deep packet inspection (DPI) techniques for traffic classification. DPI methods offer accuracy but degrade overall network throughput and thus cause problems in ensuring quality of service (QoS) and maintaining service‐level agreements. Moreover, Internet traffic is mostly end to end encrypted. This in turn limits the applicability of DPI techniques and renders them useless, unless the encryption tunnel is broken by the service provider which would risk violating user privacy. To address these trade‐offs between classification accuracy, performance, and user privacy, we resort to machine learning (ML)‐based algorithms. In this article, we apply three ensemble ML algorithms and report their performance metrics in the application layer classification of Internet traffic.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.