Using deep learning to classify community network traffic

Traffic classification is an important aspect of network management. This aspect improves the quality of service, traffic engineering, bandwidth management and internet security. Traffic classification methods continue to evolve due to the ever-changing dynamics of modern computer networks and the traffic they generate. Numerous studies on traffic classification make use of the Machine Learning (ML) and single Deep Learning (DL) models. ML classification models are effective to a certain degree. However, studies have shown they record low prediction and accuracy scores. In contrast, the proliferation of various deep learning techniques has recorded higher accuracy in traffic classification. The Deep Learning models have been successful in identifying encrypted network traffic. Furthermore, DL learns new features without the need to do much feature engineering compared to ML or Traditional methods. Traditional methods are inefficient in meeting the demands of ever-changing requirements of networks and network applications. Traditional methods are unfeasible and costly to maintain as they need constant updates to maintain their accuracy. In this study, we carry out a comparative analysis by adopting an ML model (Support Vector Machine) against the DL Models (Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and a hybrid model: CNNGRU to classify encrypted internet traffic collected from a community network. In this study, we performed a comparative analysis by adopting an ML model (Support vector machine). Machine against DL models (Convolutional Neural networks (CNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and a hybrid model: CNNGRU) and to classify encrypted internet traffic that was collected from a community network. The results show that DL models tend to generalise better with the dataset in comparison to ML. Among the deep Learning models, the hybrid model outperformed all the other models in terms of accuracy score. However, the model that had the best accuracy rate was not necessarily the one that took the shortest time when it came to prediction speed considering that it was more complex. Support vector machines outperformed the deep learning models in terms of prediction speed