Network Traffic Classification (NTC) has become an important feature in various network management operations, e.g., Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning and security services. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms as a popular approach for NTC can promise reasonable accuracy in classification and deal with encrypted traffic. However, ML-based NTC techniques suffer from the shortage of labeled traffic data which is the case in many real-world applications. This study investigates the applicability of an active form of ML, called Active Learning (AL), in NTC. AL reduces the need for a large number of labeled examples by actively choosing the instances that should be labeled. The study first provides an overview of NTC and its fundamental challenges along with surveying the literature on ML-based NTC methods. Then, it introduces the concepts of AL, discusses it in the context of NTC, and review the literature in this field. Further, challenges and open issues in AL-based classification of network traffic are discussed. Moreover, as a technical survey, some experiments are conducted to show the broad applicability of AL in NTC. The simulation results show that AL can achieve high accuracy with a small amount of data.

Communication systems and networks are evolving as an integral part of not only of our everyday life but also as a part of the industry, fundamental infrastructures, companies, etc. Current directions and concepts, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), promise the enhanced quality of life, greater business opportunities, cost-effective manufacturing, and efficient operation management through ubiquitous connectivity and deployment of smart physical objects. IoT networks can collect, preprocess, and transmit vast amounts of data. A considerable portion of this data is security- and privacy-critical data, which makes IoT networks a tempting option for attackers. Given that these networks deal with the actual aspects of our lives and fundamental infrastructures (e.g. smart grids), security in such networks is crucial. The large scale of these networks and their unique characteristics and complexity bring further vulnerabilities. In this study, we focus on the IoT application layer, security requirements, threats, and countermeasures in this layer, and some of the open issues and future research lines.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized our lives by generating large amounts of data, however, the data needs to be collected, processed, and analyzed in real-time. Network Traffic Classification (NTC) in IoT is a crucial step for optimizing network performance, enhancing security, and improving user experience. Different methods are introduced for NTC, but recently Machine Learning solutions have received high attention in this field, however, Traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods struggle with the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT traffic, as well as the limited resources of IoT devices. Deep learning shows promise but is computationally intensive for resource-constrained IoT devices. Knowledge distillation is a solution to help ML by compressing complex models into smaller ones suitable for IoT devices. In this paper, we examine the use of knowledge distillation for IoT traffic classification. Through experiments, we show that the student model achieves a balance between accuracy and efficiency. It exhibits similar accuracy to the larger teacher model while maintaining a smaller size. This makes it a suitable alternative for resource-constrained scenarios like mobile or IoT traffic classification. We find that the knowledge distillation technique effectively transfers knowledge from the teacher model to the student model, even with reduced training data. The results also demonstrate the robustness of the approach, as the student model performs well even with the removal of certain classes. Additionally, we highlight the trade-off between model capacity and computational cost, suggesting that increasing model size beyond a certain point may not be beneficial. The findings emphasize the value of soft labels in training student models with limited data resources.