Multi-Level P2P Traffic Classification Using Heuristic and Statistical-Based Techniques: A Hybrid Approach

Max Bhatia,Parminder Singh,Mehedi Masud,Vikrant Sharma

doi:10.3390/sym12122117

Max Bhatia, Parminder Singh + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/sym12122117

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Journal: Symmetry	Publication Date: Dec 20, 2020
Citations: 24	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Lovely Professional University, Taif University

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have been popular among users for more than a decade. They consume a lot of network bandwidth, due to the fact that network administrators face several issues such as congestion, security, managing resources, etc. Hence, its accurate classification will allow them to maintain a Quality of Service for various applications. Conventional classification techniques, i.e., port-based and payload-based techniques alone, have proved ineffective in accurately classifying P2P traffic as they possess significant limitations. As new P2P applications keep emerging and existing applications change their communication patterns, a single classification approach may not be sufficient to classify P2P traffic with high accuracy. Therefore, a multi-level P2P traffic classification technique is proposed in this paper, which utilizes the benefits of both heuristic and statistical-based techniques. By analyzing the behavior of various P2P applications, some heuristic rules have been proposed to classify P2P traffic. The traffic which remains unclassified as P2P undergoes further analysis, where statistical-features of traffic are used with the C4.5 decision tree for P2P classification. The proposed technique classifies P2P traffic with high accuracy (i.e., 98.30%), works with both TCP and UDP traffic, and is not affected even if the traffic is encrypted.

Highlights

The P2P networking technology is used to share and distribute media, documents, software, etc., among peers
False positive (FP): Percentage of instances incorrectly categorized as belonging to a particular class
P2P applications have been widely used since the past decade and bring a lot of conveniences, but pose various issues to the ISPs and enterprises in the tasks related to providing QoS for various applications, addressing network congestion, security, etc

Summary

Introduction

The P2P networking technology is used to share and distribute media, documents, software, etc., among peers. A decade ago, peers on the Internet used the client-server architecture, where the clients request data from the server and the server responds with the requested data Due to this reason, the majority of the Internet traffic used to be asymmetric in nature. With the evolution of P2P traffic, network traffic started becoming symmetric In such a case, a peer starts acting simultaneously as a client and server, thereby downloading and uploading the data at the same time. A peer starts acting simultaneously as a client and server, thereby downloading and uploading the data at the same time Due to this factor, as well as a rise in the number of P2P users, it has become one of the major contributors of internet traffic. There has been a significant trend of P2P file-sharing, in recent years, through P2P applications where audios, videos, games, and software are being shared or distributed, significantly large in size [2]

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