MTCLASS: Traffic classification on high-speed links with commodity hardware

Statistical traffic classification on high-speed, multi-Gb/s links has up to now been possible only with specialized, often proprietary, always quite costly hardware. In this paper we present MTCLASS, a new, multi-threaded, modular Internet statistical traffic analysis engine capable of running in real-time on commodity hardware processing multi-Gb/s traffic aggregates. Experimental results show that our engine, running on a low cost dual Xeon PC with a total of 12 cores at 2.6GHz can classify in real time using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm aggregates of up to 1.14 million packets per second, corresponding in the traces we used to a bit rate of 5.3 Gbps. We make MTCLASS' source code available to the community under an open source license.