Network traffic classification based on multi-head attention and deep metric learning

Network traffic classification plays an important role in network resource management and security. The application of encryption techniques and the rapid increase in the size of network traffic have placed higher demands on traffic classification. In this paper, we design multi-headed attention (MHA) and deep metric learning (DML) in our model for network traffic classification. In addition, MHA-DML also extracts more subtle and highly differentiated features through the improved triplet measurement loss. Experimental results demonstrate that the model achieves the best classification on all three publicly available web traffic datasets. The MHA-DML guarantees detection accuracy even when facing a classification task with many categories.