Differentiating Internet Applications Using Principal Component Analysis

The number and variety of IP applications had a tremendous increase in the last few years. Besides, Internet applications of end users are changing with the wide spread of high performance PCs connected through broadband links. An accurate mapping of traffic to applications is important for a wide range of network management tasks, like traffic engineering, service differentiation, performance/failure monitoring and security. Since traditional mapping approaches have become increasingly inaccurate, this paper presents a new approach, based on Principal Component Analysis, that is able to identify differentiating characteristics of different Internet applications, including several P2P file sharing protocols. The accuracy of the proposed approach was evaluated by performing a set of intensive tests and the results obtained show that it constitutes a valuable tool to identify peculiar characteristics of Internet applications while being, at the same time, immune to the most important disadvantages presented by other identification methods. We believe this methodology can form the basis for the development of an efficient application identification tool.