Signature maintenance for Internet application traffic identification using header signatures

Application traffic identification is important for the effective management of network resources. The header-based identification method uses the header signatures: the 3-tuple {IP address, port number, transport layer protocol (TCP/UDP)} of packet header which representing a dedicated or temporal Internet application server to overcome the limitations of other methods, such as processing overhead, payload encryption, etc. The main problem of header-based identification method is the extremely large number of signatures. Thus, we need a maintenance method to keep essential and active signatures. In this paper, we represent a novel signature maintenance method using the properties of identified traffic and usage history of signatures. We prove the feasibility and applicability of our proposed method by an acceptable experimental result.