Fine‐grained traffic classification based on functional separation

Current efforts to classify Internet traffic highlight accuracy. Previous studies have focused on the detection of major applications such as P2P and streaming applications. However, these applications can generate various types of traffic which are often considered as minor and ignorant traffic portions. As network applications become more complex, the price paid for not concentrating on minor traffic classes is in reduction of accuracy and completeness. In this context, we propose a fine‐grained traffic classification scheme and its detailed method, called functional separation. Our proposal can detect, according to functionalities, different types of traffic generated by a single application and should increase completeness by reducing the amount of undetected traffic. We verify our method with real‐world traffic. Our performance comparison against existing DPI‐based classification frameworks shows that the fine‐grained classification scheme achieves consistently higher accuracyand completeness. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.