Machine-Learned Recognition of Network Traffic for Optimization through Protocol Selection

We introduce optimization through protocol selection (OPS) as a technique to improve bulk-data transfer on shared wide-area networks (WANs). Instead of just fine-tuning the parameters of a network protocol, our empirical results show that the selection of the protocol itself can result in up to four times higher throughput in some key cases. However, OPS for the foreground traffic (e.g., TCP CUBIC, TCP BBR, UDT) depends on knowledge about the network protocols used by the background traffic (i.e., other users). Therefore, we build and empirically evaluate several machine-learned (ML) classifiers, trained on local round-trip time (RTT) time-series data gathered using active probing, to recognize the mix of network protocols in the background with an accuracy of up to 0.96.