DFE: Deep Flow Embedding for Robust Network Traffic Classification

People's increasing demand for high-quality network services has prompted the continuous attention and development of network traffic classification (NTC). In recent years, deep flow inspection (DFI) is considered to be the most effective and promising method to solve the NTC. However, DFI still cannot effectively address the problem of changes in flow characteristics of complex packet flows and the discovery of new traffic categories. In this paper, we propose a metric learning based deep learning solution with feature compressor, named deep flow embedding (DFE). The feature compressor is used to compress the feature information transmitted layer by layer in DL backbone while maintaining the computational accuracy, so that the backbone can remove as much noise, redundancy, and other irrelevant information from the input data as possible, and achieve more robust feature extraction of network traffic flow. The deep learning (DL) backbone generates an embedding vector for each network packet flow. Then the embedding vector is compared with the vector template preset for each traffic type in the template library to determine the category of the packet flow. Experimental results verify that our method is more effective than the traditional DFI methods in overcoming the problems of flow characteristics variation and new category discovery.