Growth-adaptive distillation compressed fusion model for network traffic identification based on IoT cloud–edge collaboration

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the rapid growth of the types and number of connected devices and has generated large amounts of complex and diverse traffic data. Traffic identification on edge servers solves the real-time and privacy requirements of IoT management and has attracted much attention, but still faces several problems: (1) traditional machine learning (ML) models rely on artificially constructed features, and the existing deep learning (DL) traffic identification models have reached their performance limit; and (2) insufficient computing resources of edge servers limit the possible improvement in the performance of deep learning models by increasing the number of parameters and structural complexity. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight fusion model. First, the Network-in-Network (NiN) model and Random Forest (RF) model are used on the cloud server to construct a traffic identification fusion model. The excellent representation extraction capability of the NiN compensates for the RF’s dependence on manual feature extraction, and its modular structure is suitable for the subsequent model compression operations. Then, the NiN was distilled. We propose Growth-Adaptive Distillation to lightweight the NiN model, which can reduce the operation of manually adjusting the structure of the student model and ensure the efficiency and low power consumption of the fusion model deployment. In addition, both the RF in the cloud and the distilled NiN are deployed on the edge server. Comparisons with multiple algorithms on two network traffic datasets show that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance while ensuring the use of minimal computational resources.