An approach to enhance packet classification performance of software-defined network using deep learning

Packet classification in software-defined network has become more important with the rapid growth of Internet. Existing approaches focused on the data structure algorithms to classify the packets. But the existing algorithms lead to the problem of time budget and fails to accommodate large rule sets. Thus the key task is to design an algorithm for packet classification that inflicts process overhead, and the algorithm should handle large databases of classification rule. These challenging issues are achieved by proposing rectified linear unit deep neural network. The aim of this work is twofold. First various hyper-parameter values are analyzed in order to examine how they affect the packet classification performance of deep neural network; and their performance is compared with that of popular methods, e.g., K-nearest neighbor and support vector machines. The open-source TensorFlow deep learning framework with the support of NVidia GPU units is used to carry out this work, thus allowing a large number of rules to predict the exact flow. The result shows that the proposed method performs well, and hence, this model is more suitable for large classification rules.