Exploration of 5G Traffic Models using Machine Learning

Sammanfattning: The Internet is a major communication tool that handles massive information exchanges, sees a rapidly increasing usage, and offers an increasingly wide variety of services.   In addition to these trends, the services themselves have highly varying quality of service (QoS), requirements and the network providers must take into account the frequent releases of new network standards like 5G. This has resulted in a significant need for new theoretical models that can capture different network traffic characteristics. Such models are important both for understanding the existing traffic in networks, and to generate better synthetic traffic workloads that can be used to evaluate future generations of network solutions using realistic workload patterns under a broad range of assumptions and based on how the popularity of existing and future application classes may change over time. To better meet these changes, new flexible methods are required. In this thesis, a new framework aimed towards analyzing large quantities of traffic data is developed and used to discover key characteristics of application behavior for IP network traffic. Traffic models are created by breaking down IP log traffic data into different abstraction layers with descriptive values. The aggregated statistics are then clustered using the K-means algorithm, which results in groups with closely related behaviors. Lastly, the model is evaluated with cluster analysis and three different machine learning algorithms to classify the network behavior of traffic flows. From the analysis framework a set of observed traffic models with distinct behaviors are derived that may be used as building blocks for traffic simulations in the future. Based on the framework we have seen that machine learning achieve high performance on the classification of network traffic, with a Multilayer Perceptron getting the best results. Furthermore, the study has produced a set of ten traffic models that have been demonstrated to be able to reconstruct traffic for various network entities.