On different ways to classify Internet traffic: a short review of selected publications

Traffic classification is an important tool for network management. It reveals the source of observed network traffic and has many potential applications in Quality of Service, network security, traffic visualization, and more. In the last decade, traffic classification evolved quickly due to the raise of peer-to-peer traffic. Nowadays, researchers still find new methods in order to withstand the rapid changes in the Internet. In this paper, we review 13 papers on traffic classification and related topics that were published during 2009-2012. We show diversity in recent algorithms and we highlight possible directions for the future research on traffic classification: relevance of multi-level classification, importance of experimental validation, and the need for common traffic datasets.