A Novel SDN-Based Application-Awareness Mechanism by Using Deep Learning

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities, more and more types of applications have been emerging. In fact, different applications have different features and different requirements on services. In order to satisfy users' Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, the application-awareness technique should be leveraged to distinguish different applications for providing the differentiated services. However, the traditional Internet only can obtain the local network view, which belongs to the offline awareness mode and cannot adapt to the dynamical network environment. At the right time, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been accepted as a new networking paradigm thanks to its network awareness on the global status information, which can greatly facilitate the online application-awareness. At present, three ways, i.e., port number, depth packet inspection and deep learning can be used for the application-awareness. To the best of our knowledge, the deep learning based application-awareness method is the most cutting-edge technique. In spite of this, the previous related schemes fail to effectively guarantee the correctness and stability. To this end, this paper proposes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based deep learning mechanism to do the application-awareness, including three phases, i.e., traffic collection, data pre-processing and application-awareness. The SDN environment is implemented based on the MiniNet and the simulation experiments are made based on the TensorFlow. The experimental results show that the proposed application-awareness mechanism outperforms three benchmarks on recall ratio, precision ratio, F value and stability.