Session Level Flow Classification by Packet Size Distribution and Session Grouping

Classifying traffic into specific network applications is essential for application-aware network management and it becomes more challenging because modern applications complicate their network behaviors. While port number-based classifiers work only for some well-known applications and signature-based classifiers are not applicable to encrypted packet payloads, researchers tend to classify network traffic based on behaviors observed in network applications. In this paper, a Session Level Flow Classification (SLFC) approach is proposed to classify network flows as a session, which comprises of flows in the same conversation.