Zero-Shot Traffic Identification with Attribute and Graph-Based Representations for Edge Computing

With the proliferation of mobile terminals and the rapid growth of network applications, fine-grained traffic identification has become increasingly challenging. Methods based on machine learning and deep learning have achieved remarkable results, but they heavily rely on the distribution of training data, which makes them ineffective in handling unseen samples. In this paper, we propose AG-ZSL, a zero-shot learning framework based on traffic behavior and attribute representations for general encrypted traffic classification. AG-ZSL primarily learns two mapping functions: one that captures traffic behavior embeddings from burst-based traffic interaction graphs, and the other that learns attribute embeddings from traffic attribute descriptions. Then, the framework minimizes the distance between these embeddings within the shared feature space. The gradient rejection algorithm and K-Nearest Neighbors are introduced to implement a two-stage method for general traffic classification. Experimental results on IoT datasets demonstrate that AG-ZSL achieves exceptional performance in classifying both known and unknown traffic, highlighting its potential for enhancing secure and efficient traffic management at the network edge.