An accurate traffic classification model based on support vector machines

Network traffic classification is a fundamental research topic on high‐performance network protocol design and network operation management. Compared with other state‐of‐the‐art studies done on the network traffic classification, machine learning (ML) methods are more flexible and intelligent, which can automatically search for and describe useful structural patterns in a supplied traffic dataset. As a typical ML method, support vector machines (SVMs) based on statistical theory has high classification accuracy and stability. However, the performance of SVM classifier can be severely affected by the data scale, feature dimension, and parameters of the classifier. In this paper, a real‐time accurate SVM training model named SPP‐SVM is proposed. An SPP‐SVM is deducted from the scaling dataset and employs principal component analysis (PCA) to extract data features and verify its relevant traffic features obtained from PCA. By employing PCA algorithm to do the dimension extraction, SPP‐SVM confirms the critical component features, reduces the redundancy among them, and lowers the original feature dimension so as to reduce the over fitting and increase its generalization effectively. The optimal working parameters of kernel function used in SPP‐SVM are derived automatically from improved particle swarm optimization algorithm, which will optimize the global solution and make its inertia weight coefficient adaptive without searching for the parameters in a wide range, traversing all the parameter points in the grid and adjusting steps gradually. The performance of its two‐ and multi‐class classifiers is proved over 2 sets of traffic traces, coming from different topological points on the Internet. Experiments show that the SPP‐SVM's two‐ and multi‐class classifiers are superior to the typical supervised ML algorithms and performs significantly better than traditional SVM in classification accuracy, dimension, and elapsed time.