A Transform Domain-Based Anomaly Detection Approach To Network-Wide Traffic

Traffic anomalies contain existing abnormal changes in network traffic, which are derived from malicious and anomalous behaviors of users or network devices, such as network faults, abuses, network attacks, etc. These anomalies often damage our operation networks and even lead to network disruptions. In the present paper, we propose a novel method for detecting traffic anomalies in a network by exacting and capturing their features in the transform domain. Here, we take in consideration network topology information and network-wide traffic jointly. We find that anomalous network-wide traffic usually exhibits distinct high-frequency nature. This motivates us to utilize transform domain analysis theory to characterize network-wide traffic to identify its abnormal components. Besides, we group all origin-destination flows in the network in accordance with common destination nodes. By combining network topology information and transform-domain analysis in the given time window, the specious traffic components can be found and identified. Simulation results show that our detection algorithm exhibits a fairly robust detection ability and provides the better detection performance than previous algorithms. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.