SAM: Self-Attention based Deep Learning Method for Online Traffic Classification

Guorui Xie, Qing Li, Yong Jiang, Tao Dai, Gengbiao Shen, Rui Li, Richard O. Sinnott, Shutao Xia

Abstract: Network traffic classification categorizes traffic classes based on protocols (e.g., HTTP or DNS) or applications (e.g., Facebook or Gmail). Its accuracy is a key foundation of some network management tasks like Quality-of-Service (QoS) control, anomaly detection, etc. To further improve the accuracy of traffic classification, recent researches have introduced deep learning based methods. However, most of them utilize the privacy-concerned payload (user data). Besides, they generally do not consider the dependency of bytes in a packet, which we believe can be exploited for the more accurate classification. In this work, we treat the initial bytes of a network packet as a language and propose a novel Self-Attention based Method (SAM) for traffic classification. The average F1-scores of SAM on protocol and application classification are 98.62% and 98.93%. With the higher accuracy of SAM, better QoS and anomaly detection can be met.