Analysis of the impact of sampling on NetFlow traffic classification

  • Authors:
  • Valentín Carela-Español;Pere Barlet-Ros;Albert Cabellos-Aparicio;Josep Solé-Pareta

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. Arquitectura de Computadors, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Campus Nord, Edif. D6, C. Jordi Girona, 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain;Dept. Arquitectura de Computadors, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Campus Nord, Edif. D6, C. Jordi Girona, 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain;Dept. Arquitectura de Computadors, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Campus Nord, Edif. D6, C. Jordi Girona, 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain;Dept. Arquitectura de Computadors, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Campus Nord, Edif. D6, C. Jordi Girona, 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The traffic classification problem has recently attracted the interest of both network operators and researchers. Several machine learning (ML) methods have been proposed in the literature as a promising solution to this problem. Surprisingly, very few works have studied the traffic classification problem with Sampled NetFlow data. However, Sampled NetFlow is a widely extended monitoring solution among network operators. In this paper we aim to fulfill this gap. First, we analyze the performance of current ML methods with NetFlow by adapting a popular ML-based technique. The results show that, although the adapted method is able to obtain similar accuracy than previous packet-based methods (~90%), its accuracy degrades drastically in the presence of sampling. In order to reduce this impact, we propose a solution to network operators that is able to operate with Sampled NetFlow data and achieve good accuracy in the presence of sampling.