Deep and Spatio-Temporal Detection for Abnormal Traffic in Cloud Data Centers

Current interactions of network traffic through cloud data centers have become an important process of network services. Precise and real-time detection and prediction of network traffic can assist system operators in effectively allocating resources, and assessing network performance based on actual service requirements, and analyzing network health. However, sources and distribution of network traffic are different, which makes accurate warnings of network attack traffic become a difficult problem. In recent years, neural networks have been proven to be effective in predicting time series data, particularly long short-term memory networks for capturing temporal features and convolutional methods for capturing spatial features. This work proposes a Deep Hybrid Spatio-Temporal (DHST) network method for abnormal traffic detection in cloud data centers, which combines a cooperative temporal convolutional network, an attention mechanism and a random inactivation method to capture the network traffic data's spatio-temporal features. It improves accuracy of abnormal traffic detection, and realizes classification of normal traffic and abnormal one. It achieves higher accuracy than typical detection methods when applied to a real-life dataset collected from Yahoo Webscope S5.