The massive adoption of hand-held devices has led to the explosion of mobile traffic volumes traversing home and enterprise networks, as well as the Internet. Traffic Classification (TC), i.e. the set of procedures for inferring (mobile) applications generating such traffic, has become nowadays the enabler for highly-valuable profiling information (with certain privacy downsides), other than being the workhorse for service differentiation/blocking. Nonetheless, the design of accurate classifiers is exacerbated by the raising adoption of encrypted protocols (such as TLS), hindering the suitability of (effective) deep packet inspection approaches. Also, the fast-expanding set of apps and the moving-target nature of mobile traffic makes design solutions with usual machine learning, based on manually-and expert-originated features, outdated and unable to keep the pace. For these reasons Deep Learning (DL) is here proposed, for the first time, as a viable strategy to design practical mobile traffic classifiers based on automatically-extracted features, able to cope with encrypted traffic, and reflecting their complex traffic patterns. To this end, different state-of-the-art DL techniques from (standard) TC are here reproduced, dissected (highlighting critical choices), and set into a systematic framework for comparison, including also a performance evaluation workbench. The latter outcome, although declined in the mobile context, has the applicability appeal to the wider umbrella of encrypted TC tasks. Finally, the performance of these DL classifiers is critically investigated based on an exhaustive experimental validation (based on three mobile datasets of real human users’ activity), highlighting the related pitfalls, design guidelines, and challenges.

Sensor technologies empower Industry 4.0 by enabling integration of in-field and real-time raw data into digital twins. However, sensors might be unreliable due to inherent issues and/or environmental conditions. This paper aims at detecting anomalies in measurements from sensors, identifying the faulty ones and accommodating them with appropriate estimated data, thus paving the way to reliable digital twins. More specifically, we propose a general machine-learning-based architecture for sensor validation built upon a series of neural-network estimators and a classifier. Estimators correspond to virtual sensors of all unreliable sensors (to reconstruct normal behaviour and replace the isolated faulty sensor within the system), whereas the classifier is used for detection and isolation tasks. A comprehensive statistical analysis on three different real-world data-sets is conducted and the performance of the proposed architecture validated under hard and soft synthetically-generated faults.

In this paper, we study channel-aware decision fusion (DF) in a wireless sensor network (WSN), where the sensors transmit their decisions simultaneously for spectral efficiency purposes and the DF center (DFC) is equipped with multiple antennas. Also, each sensor-DFC channel is described via a Rician model. As opposed to the existing literature, in order to account for stringent energy constraints in the WSN, only statistical channel information is assumed for the non-line-of-sight (scattered) fading terms. For such a scenario, suboptimal fusion rules are developed in order to deal with the exponential complexity of the likelihood ratio test (LRT) and impractical (complete) system knowledge. Furthermore, the considered model is extended to the case of (partially unknown) jamming-originated interference. Then, the obtained fusion rules are modified with the use of composite hypothesis testing framework and generalized LRT. Coincidence and statistical equivalence among them are also investigated under some relevant simplified scenarios. Numerical results compare the proposed rules and highlight their jamming-suppression capability.

In this paper, we provide a study of channel-aware decision fusion (DF) over a “virtual” multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel in the large-array regime at the DF center (DFC). The considered scenario takes into account channel estimation and inhomogeneous large-scale fading between the sensors and the DFC. The aim is the development of (widely) linear fusion rules, as opposed to the unsuitable optimum log-likelihood ratio (LLR). The proposed rules can effectively benefit from performance improvement via a large array, differently from existing suboptimal alternatives. Performance evaluation, along with theoretical achievable performance and complexity analysis, is presented. Simulation results are provided to confirm the findings. Analogies and differences with uplink communication in a multiuser (massive) MIMO scenario are underlined.

The increasing diffusion of mobile devices has dramatically changed the network traffic landscape, with Traffic Classification (TC) surging into a fundamental role while facing new and unprecedented challenges. The recent and appealing adoption of Deep Learning (DL) techniques has risen as the solution overcoming the performance of ML techniques based on tedious and time-consuming handcrafted feature design. Still, the black-box nature of DL models prevents its practical and trustful adoption in critical scenarios where the reliability/interpretation of results/policies is of key importance. To cope with these limitations, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques have recently acquired the interest of the community. Accordingly, in this work we investigate trustworthiness and interpretability via XAI-based techniques to understand, interpret and improve the behavior of state-of-the-art multimodal DL traffic classifiers. The proposed methodology, as opposed to common results seen in XAI, attempts to provide global interpretation, rather than sample-based ones. Results, based on an open dataset, allow to complement the above findings with domain knowledge.

Internet of Things (IoT) fosters unprecedented network heterogeneity and dynamicity, thus increasing the variety and the amount of related vulnerabilities. Hence, traditional security approaches fall short, also in terms of resulting scalability and privacy. In this paper we propose H2ID, a two-stage hierarchical Network Intrusion Detection approach. H2ID performs (i) anomaly detection via a novel lightweight solution based on a MultiModal Deep AutoEncoder (M2-DAE), and (ii) attack classification, using soft-output classifiers. We validate our proposal using the recently-released Bot-IoT dataset, inferring among four relevant categories of attack (DDoS, DoS, Scan, and Theft) and unknown attacks. Results show gains of the proposed M2-DAE in the case of simple anomaly detection (up to −40% false-positive rate when compared with several baselines at same true positive rate) and for H2ID as a whole when compared to the best-performing misuse detector approach (up to ≈ +5% F1 score). Besides the performance advantages, our system is suitable for distributed and privacy-preserving deployments while limiting re-training necessities, in line with the high efficiency as well as the flexibility required in IoT scenarios.