Analyzing Traffic Characteristics of Application Using Chi-Square Statistic

The knowledge of traffic behavior characteristics of every application has vital effect on the accuracy and granularity of application identification. Based on analyzing the Chi-Square Statistics, a novel method named ABSA is proposed to analyze the traffic behavior characteristics of applications. The ABSA method does not focus on any certain applications; in contrast, it aims at providing a quantitative measurement for describing the behavior differences among applications. So that the traffic behavior characteristics and their significances of any applications can be determined. The theoretical analysis and experiments results also indicate that, the ABSA method can keep the sequence of behavior characteristic significance unchanged in packet sampling environment, which is often used by NetFlow and many other flow information collecting systems, to simplify the process of characteristic re-selection when sampling rate changes.