Traffic classification is an important tool for network management. It reveals the source of observed network traffic and has many potential applications e.g. in Quality of Service, network security and traffic visualization. In the last decade, traffic classification evolved quickly due to the raise of peer-to-peer traffic. Nowadays, researchers still find new methods in order to withstand the rapid changes of the Internet. In this paper, we review 13 publications on traffic classification and related topics that were published during 2009-2012. We show diversity in recent algorithms and we highlight possible directions for the future research on traffic classification: relevance of multi-level classification, importance of experimental validation, and the need for common traffic datasets.

The article introduces a novel Internet diagnosis utility - an open source IP packet snifferwhich captures TCP and UDP packets sent and received by a single Linux process only. Preliminary evaluation results are presented. The utility can be applied in the field of IP traffic classification.

Illegal elements use the characteristics of an anonymous network hidden service mechanism to build a dark network and conduct various illegal activities, which brings a serious challenge to network security. The existing anonymous traffic classification methods suffer from cumbersome feature selection and difficult feature information extraction, resulting in low accuracy of classification. To solve this problem, a classification method based on three-dimensional Markov images and output self-attention convolutional neural network is proposed. This method first divides and cleans anonymous traffic data packets according to sessions, then converts the cleaned traffic data into three-dimensional Markov images according to the transition probability matrix of bytes, and finally inputs the images to the output self-attention convolution neural network to train the model and perform classification. The experimental results show that the classification accuracy and F1-score of the proposed method for Tor, I2P, Freenet, and ZeroNet can exceed 98.5%, and the average classification accuracy and F1-score for 8 kinds of user behaviors of each type of anonymous traffic can reach 93.7%. The proposed method significantly improves the classification effect of anonymous traffic compared with the existing methods.