Towards a Transformer-Based Pre-trained Model for IoT Traffic Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces ITCT, a transformer-based pre-trained model for IoT traffic classification that performs well even with limited labeled data, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel transformer-based pre-trained model for IoT traffic classification that can be fine-tuned with small datasets, addressing data scarcity issues.

Findings

ITCT achieves 82% accuracy in traffic classification.

Pre-training on large datasets improves performance with limited data.

Code availability supports reproducibility.

Abstract

The classification of IoT traffic is important to improve the efficiency and security of IoT-based networks. As the state-of-the-art classification methods are based on Deep Learning, most of the current results require a large amount of data to be trained. Thereby, in real-life situations, where there is a scarce amount of IoT traffic data, the models would not perform so well. Consequently, these models underperform outside their initial training conditions and fail to capture the complex characteristics of network traffic, rendering them inefficient and unreliable in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose IoT Traffic Classification Transformer (ITCT), a novel approach that utilizes the state-of-the-art transformer-based model named TabTransformer. ITCT, which is pre-trained on a large labeled MQTT-based IoT traffic dataset and may be fine-tuned with a small set of labeled data, showed promising results in various traffic classification tasks. Our experiments demonstrated that the ITCT model significantly outperforms existing models, achieving an overall accuracy of 82%. To support reproducibility and collaborative development, all associated code has been made publicly available.