Real-Time Traffic Classification using Simple CART Forest on FPGAs

Abstract

Traffic classification process categorizes internet traffic into application classes by exploiting packet header data or collected packet statistics. Real-time internet traffic classification is mostly required for network management and security applications. Machine Learning (ML) based traffic classification approaches which utilize statistical properties of traffic flows, have recently attracted great deal of attention from the researches due to its operability under encrypted traffic conditions. In this paper, we propose to use Simple Classification and Regression Trees Forest (SCF) for internet traffic classification. Our proposed scheme comprising multiple parallel trees demonstrates a substantial improvement in search delay and throughput as well as in the memory footprint when compared to a traditional single Simple CART structure. To reach high data rates for real-time classification, we also proposed a parallel and pipelined architecture on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that support SCF data structure. The post place-and-route FPGA results demonstrate that our design can sustain 854 Gbps or 2669 million classification per second (MCPS) for the minimum packet size of 40 Bytes. Furthermore, our architecture shows an accuracy of 96.6719% for real internet traffic with eight application classes.