Network Traffic Analysis, Importance, Techniques: A Review

Since the release of tcpdump in 1988 the network traffic data are been captured, analyzed and used for network security related decision making. But as the technologies evolved various types of methods can be used for network traffic analysis. The prominent once are Data Mining techniques, Statistical techniques and Visualization techniques, which are surveyed and studied in the following various sections of the paper. Machine Learning techniques are the latest ones to contribute a lot regarding network traffic analysis which forms the backbone of network security and is the important responsibility of administrators. At the end of the paper summarization of papers studied is presented