Pruned-F1DCN: A lightweight network model for traffic classification

With the continuous development of deep learning, deep neural networks are gradually applied to traffic classification problems. However, the large network structure and parameter number of deep neural networks hinder the application on edge computing devices. Reducing network scale helps relieve computational pressure, this paper proposes a lightweight traffic classification model to provide reliable accuracy and reduce the consumption of computing resources. In this work, we design an F1DCN network, which takes full advantage of the convolution layer parameters and the convolution kernel field of view. The lightweight approach effectively improves the classification performance and saves massive parameters. The model pruning method is applied to find the optimal structure of the network. Experiments on two public datasets show that the proposed model reduce more than 80 % parameters and 45 % FLOPS compared with traditional traffic classification methods, and maintaining more than 95 % classification accuracy.