On the use of compression algorithms for the classification of IP flows

In the last few years, the classification of IP traffic flows according to application level protocols has emerged as a key issue for the design and development of multiservice IP networks. Several proposals have been made to address this problem and to enhance such systems, but to the best of our knowledge none of them is suitable for reliably identifying the application that generated the IP traffic. This paper introduces a new approach, based on the use of compression algorithms, which can be used to classify applications running over TCP. Three different compression algorithms are taken into consideration and applied to real traffic traces, so as to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and to evaluate the performance.