Classification of Peer-to-Peer Traffic Using A Two-Stage Window-Based Classifier With Fast Decision Tree and IP Layer Attributes

This paper presents a new approach using data mining techniques, and in particular a two-stage architecture, for classification of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic in IP networks where in the first stage the traffic is filtered using standard port numbers and layer 4 port matching to label well-known P2P and NonP2P traffic. The labeled traffic produced in the first stage is used to train a Fast Decision Tree (FDT) classifier with high accuracy. The Unknown traffic is then applied to the FDT model which classifies the traffic into P2P and NonP2P with high accuracy. The two-stage architecture not only classifies well-known P2P applications, but also classifies applications that use random or non-standard port numbers and cannot be classified otherwise. The authors captured the internet traffic at a gateway router, performed pre-processing on the data, selected the most significant attributes, and prepared a training data set to which the new algorithm was applied. Finally, the authors built several models using a combination of various attribute sets for different ratios of P2P to NonP2P traffic in the training data.