The Flocking Based and GPU Accelerated Internet Traffic Classification

Professor Zhiguang Xu
Valdosta State University
USA
E-mail: zxu@valdosta.edu

Abstract: Mainstream attentions have been brought to the issue of Internet traffic classification due to its political, economic, and legal impacts on appropriate use, pricing, and management of the Internet. Nowadays, both the research and operational communities prefer to classify network traffic through approaches that are based on the statistics of traffic flow features due to their high accuracy and improved robustness. However, these approaches are faced with two main challenges: identify key flow features that capture fundamental characteristics of different types of traffic in an unsupervised way; and complete the task of traffic classification with acceptable time and space costs. In this paper, we address these challenges using a biologically inspired computational model that imitates the flocking behavior of social animals (e.g. birds) and implement it in the form of parallel programs on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based platform of CUDA from NVIDIA™. The experimental results demonstrate that our flocking model accelerated by GPU can not only effectively select and prioritize key flow features to classify both well-known and unseen network traffic into different categories, but also get the job done significantly faster than its traditional CPU-based counterparts due to the high magnitude of parallelism that it exhibits.

Brief Biography of the Speaker: Prof. Zhiguang Xu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Central Florida, FL, USA in 2001. He is currently Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Math and Computer Science at Valdosta State University, GA, USA. His research and teaching interests include Computer Networking, Artificial Intelligence, Parallel and Distributed Computing, and Computer Science Education. Professor Xu is author or co-author of more than 25 published papers in refereed journals or conference proceedings. He has been awarded many grants from both academic and industrial entities. He is actively serving as committee member, reviewer, or lecturer of many national and international conferences and organizations.