Pattern Recognition Approaches for Classifying IP Flows

The assignment of an IP flow to a class, according to the application that generated it, is at the basis of any modern network management platform. However, classification techniques such as the ones based oil the analysis of transport layer or application layer information are rapidly becoming ineffective. Moreover, in several network scenarios it is quite unrealistic to assume that all the classes an IP flow call belong to are a priori known. In these cases. in fact, some network protocols may be known, but novel protocols call appear so giving rise to unknown classes.