BCAC: Batch Classifier based on Agglomerative Clustering for traffic classification in a backbone network

Backbone network is the core part of the Internet. Due to the high transmission speed of traffic in the backbone network, Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring of services in the backbone network becomes a highly important and challenging issue. Traffic classification is the basis of QoS monitoring. The existing traffic classification is based on full traffic, which is impractical in high-speed backbone network traffic. This paper presents a method to classify the sampled traffic and gives an example of its application in QoS monitoring. Specifically, we design the Multiple Counter Sketch (MC Sketch) to quickly extract features from the sampled data stream in a backbone, propose the Batch Classifier based on Agglomerative Clustering (BCAC) for unsupervised clustering of traffic, and combine with the supervised machine learning method to train the labeled data in the clustering results to get the classification model. The experimental results of sampled traffic collected on a 10Gbps link show that even when the sampling ratio is 1:1024, the accuracy of our classification model reaches 96.3%. When different block sizes are set, the average clustering time of BCAC is only about one-third of the traditional agglomerative classifier. Moreover, we give an example of applying our traffic classification method to monitor the QoS, and the results show that our method can efficiently and accurately monitor the QoS dynamics of backbone network traffic.