A Deep Learning Based Method for Network Application Classification in Software-Defined IoT

Network Application Classification (NAC) is a vital technology for intrusion detection, Quality-of-Service (QoS)-aware traffic engineering, traffic analysis, and network anomalies. Researchers have focused on designing algorithms using deep learning models based on statistical information to address the challenges of traditional payload and port-based traffic classification techniques. Internet of Things (IoT) and Software Defined Network (SDN) are two popular technologies nowadays and aims to connect devices over the internet and intelligently control networks from a centralized space. IoT aims to connect billions of devices; therefore, classification is essential for efficient processing. SDN is a new networking paradigm, which separates data plane measurement from the control plane. The emergence of deep learning algorithms with SDN provides a scalable traffic classification architecture. Due to the inadequate results of payload and port-based approaches, a statistical technique to classify network traffic into different classes using a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is presented in this paper. This paper provides a classification method for software defined IoT networks. The results show that, contrary to other traffic classification methods, the proposed approach offered a better accuracy rate of over 99 %, which is promising.