A Multi-Perspective Feature Approach to Few-Shot Classification of IoT Traffic

The realization of Internet of Things (IoT) traffic classification is crucial to the management and monitoring of the IoT network. Performing IoT traffic classification under a few-shot scenario is vital due to extremely rapid growth in the number of IoT devices and necessity to save computational costs. In this paper, we propose MAFFIT, a multi-perspective feature approach to few-shot classification of IoT traffic. The purpose is to comprehensively consider the information of network traffic and to achieve accurate classification of IoT traffic using a limited number of samples. MAFFIT is based on our key observation that traffic behaviour and traffic composition are highly consistent across IoT traffic of the same class. For a flow, MAFFIT will first extract the packet length sequences and packet byte sequence, then encodes the features of the corresponding sequences using feature construction, and finally uses comparative learning to obtain the class of the flow without the additional cost of training a comparison model. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world IoT traffic datasets, the results demonstrate that MAFFIT can achieve accurate IoT traffic classification using a limited number of flow samples and MAFFIT outperforms three existing network traffic classification methods.