A Deep Learning Approach for IoT Traffic Multi-Classification in a Smart-City Scenario

As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications increases, the capacity  of the IoT access networks is considerably stressed. This can create significant performance bottlenecks in various layers of an end-to-end communication path, including the scheduling of the spectrum, the resource requirements for processing the IoT data at the Edge and/or Cloud, and the attainable delay for critical emergency scenarios. Thus, a proper classification or prediction of the time varying traffic characteristics
of the IoT devices is required. However, this classification remains at large an open challenge. Most of the existing solutions are based on machine learning techniques, which nonetheless present high computational cost, whereas they are not considering the fine-grained flow characteristics of the traffic. To this end, this paper introduces the following four contributions. Firstly, we provide an extended feature set including, flow, packet and device level features to characterize the IoT devices in the context of a smart environment. Secondly, we propose a custom weighting based preprocessing algorithm to determine the importance of the data values. Thirdly, we present insights into traffic characteristics using feature selection and correlation mechanisms. Finally, we  develop a two-stage learning algorithm and we demonstrate its ability to accurately categorize the IoT devices in two different datasets. The evaluation results show that the proposed learning framework achieves 99.9% accuracy for the first dataset and 99.8% accuracy for the second. Additionally, for the first dataset we achieve a precision and recall performance of 99.6% and 99.5%, while for the second dataset the precision and recall attained is of 99.6% and 99.7% respectively. These results show that our approach clearly outperforms other well-known machine learning methods. Hence, this work provides a useful model deployed in a realistic IoT scenario, where IoT traffic and devices’ profiles are predicted and classified, while facilitating the data processing in the upper layers of an end-to-end communication model.