As the emerging services have increasingly strict requirements on quality of
service (QoS), such as millisecond network service latency ect., network
traffic classification technology is required to assist more advanced network
management and monitoring capabilities. So far as we know, the delays of
flow-granularity classification methods are difficult to meet the real-time
requirements for too long packet-waiting time, whereas the present
packet-granularity classification methods may have problems related to privacy
protection due to using excessive user payloads. To solve the above problems,
we proposed a network traffic classification method only by the IP packet
header, which satisfies the requirements of both user's privacy protection and
classification performances. We opted to remove the IP address from the header
information of the network layer and utilized the remaining 12-byte IP packet
header information as input for the model. Additionally, we examined the
variations in header value distributions among different categories of network
traffic samples. And, the external attention is also introduced to form the
online classification framework, which performs well for its low time
complexity and strong ability to enhance high-dimensional classification
features. The experiments on three open-source datasets show that our average
accuracy can reach upon 94.57%, and the classification time is shortened to
meet the real-time requirements (0.35ms for a single packet).Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure