Novel applications of Machine Learning to Network Traffic Analysis and Prediction

Abstract

It is now clear that machine learning will be widely used in future telecommunication networks as it is increasingly used in today's networks. However, despite its increasing application and its enormous potential, there are still many areas in which the new techniques developed in the area of machine learning are not yet fully utilized. The aim of this thesis is to present the application of innovative techniques of machine learning (ML-Machine Learning) in the field of Telecommunications, and specifically to problems related to the analysis and prediction of traffic in data networks (NTAP - Network Traffic Analysis and Prediction). The applications of NTAP are very broad, so this thesis focuses on the following five specific areas: - Prediction of connectivity of wireless devices. - Security intrusion detection, using network traffic information - Classification of network traffic, using the headers of the transmitted network packets - Estimation of the quality of the experience perceived by the user (QoE) when viewing multimedia streaming, using aggregate information of the network packets - Generation of synthetic traffic associated with security attacks and use of that synthetic traffic to improve security intrusion detection algorithms. The final intention is to create prediction and analysis models that produce improvements in the NTAP areas mentioned above. With this objective, this thesis provides advances in the application of machine learning techniques to the area of NTAP. These advances consist of: - Development of new machine learning models and architectures for NTAP - Define new ways to structure and transform training data so that existing machine learning models can be applied to specific NTAP problems. - Define algorithms for the creation of synthetic network traffic associated with specific events in the operation of the network (for example, specific types of intrusions), ensuring that the new synthetic data can be used as new training data. - Extension and application of classic models of machine learning to the area of NTAP, obtaining improvements in the classification or regression metrics and/or improvements in the performance measures of the algorithms (e.g. training time, prediction time, memory needs, ...).