Behavior Analysis of Internet Traffic via Bipartite Graphs and One-Mode Projections

• Published in: IEEE/ACM transactions on networking Vol. 22; no. 3; pp. 931 - 942
• Main Authors: Xu, Kuai, Wang, Feng, Gu, Lin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2014; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Behavior; Behavior graph analysis; bipartite graph; Clustering; clustering algorithms; Codes; Graphs; Internet; Networks; one-mode projection; Projection; Similarity; Traffic engineering; Traffic flow; traffic profiling
• ISSN: 1063-6692; 1558-2566
• DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2013.2264634

As Internet traffic continues to grow in size and complexity, it has become an increasingly challenging task to understand behavior patterns of end-hosts and network applications. This paper presents a novel approach based on behavioral graph analysis to study the behavior similarity of Internet end-hosts. Specifically, we use bipartite graphs to model host communications from network traffic and build one-mode projections of bipartite graphs for discovering social-behavior similarity of end-hosts. By applying simple and efficient clustering algorithms on the similarity matrices and clustering coefficient of one-mode projection graphs, we perform network-aware clustering of end-hosts in the same network prefixes into different end-host behavior clusters and discover inherent clustered groups of Internet applications. Our experiment results based on real datasets show that end-host and application behavior clusters exhibit distinct traffic characteristics that provide improved interpretations on Internet traffic. Finally, we demonstrate the practical benefits of exploring behavior similarity in profiling network behaviors, discovering emerging network applications, and detecting anomalous traffic patterns.