Application Traffic Classification using PSS Signature

Recently, network traffic has become more complex and diverse due to the emergence of new applications and services. Therefore, the importance of application-level traffic classification is increasing rapidly, and it has become a very popular research area. Although a lot of methods for traffic classification have been introduced in literature, they have some limitations to achieve an acceptable level of performance in real-time application-level traffic classification. In this paper, we propose a novel application-level traffic classification method using payload size sequence (PSS) signature. The proposed method generates unique PSS signatures for each application using packet order, direction and payload size of the first N packets in a flow, and uses them to classify application traffic. The evaluation shows that this method can classify application traffic easily and quickly with high accuracy rates, over 99.97%. Furthermore, the method can also classify application traffic that uses the same application protocol or is encrypted.