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

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.