An efficient method to maintain the header signatures for internet traffic identification

With the rapid development of the Internet in recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on importance of application traffic identification for efficient network management. Although various identification methods have been proposed, it is difficult to apply them to real networks due to several problems. To overcome the limitations of existing methods, we proposed the header signatures, i.e., the 3-tuple {IP address, port number, and L4 protocol (TCP/UDP)} of the packet header that represents either a dedicated or a temporary Internet application (service) server. However, a problem with this method is that the number of signatures increases rapidly because header signatures are composed of combinations of header elements in a rapidly changing network, as many servers providing application lunch and disappear in every day. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for signature maintenance using the weight of the signature, which is measured by a function consisting of maintenance elements.