Evolutionary Algorithm-Based and Network Architecture Search-Enabled Multiobjective Traffic Classification

Abstract

Network traffic classification technology plays an important role in network security management. However, the inherent limitations of traditional methods have become increasingly obvious, and they cannot address existing traffic classification tasks. Very recently, neural architecture search (NAS) has aroused widespread interest as a tool to automate the manual architecture construction process. To this end, this paper proposes NAS based on multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) to classify malicious network traffic. The main purpose is to simplify the search space by reducing the spatial ratio and number of channels of the model. In addition, the search strategy is changed in the effective search space, and the utilized strategies include EAs with the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm with the elite retention strategy (NSGA-II), strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA-II) and multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) to solve the formulated multiobjective NAS. Through comprehensive comparison of the population convergence times, model accuracies, Pareto optimality sets, model complexities and running speeds of the strategies, it is concluded that the model based on NSGA-II search has the best performance. The experimental results of the current machine learning algorithms and artificial learning methods based on the network are compared, showing that our method achieved better classification performance on two public datasets with a lower computational complexity, as mainly measured by FLOPs. Our approach is able to achieve 99.806% and 99.369% F1-score with 11.501 MB and 4.718 MB FLOPs on both IDS2012 and ISCX VPN dataset respectively.