Capsule Network Assisted IoT Traffic Classification Mechanism for Smart Cities

With rapid development of compelling application scenarios of the Internet of Things (IoT), such as smart cities, it becomes substantially important to strengthen the management of data traffic in IoT networks. Traffic classification is beneficial in terms of both ensuring network security and improving quality of service. Traditional IoT traffic classification methods separate the classification algorithm and the design of feature engineering, which includes feature extraction and feature selection. Then, traffic identification or classification is performed by combining both. This paper proposes an end-to-end IoT traffic classification method relying on a deep learning aided capsule network for the sake of forming an efficient classification mechanism that integrates feature extraction, feature selection, and classification model. Our proposed traffic classification method beneficially eliminates the process of manually selecting traffic features, and is particularly applicable to smart city scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that capsule networks have been used in the context of traffic classification. Experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed traffic classification mechanism, which yields high classification accuracy.