The proliferation of next-generation Internet infrastructures and the Internet of Things (IoT) has exponentially increased network traffic complexity. While deep learning (DL)-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) show immense potential, they persistently suffer from challenges including high computational overhead, vanishing gradients in deep architectures, and acute sensitivity to noise. Consequently, these issues impede their real-time deployment in resource-constrained edge computing environments. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel, lightweight, and robust intrusion detection framework based on deep neural networks (DNNs). Initially, we employ a Robust Scaler-based statistical preprocessing strategy to supersede traditional Z-score standardization, effectively mitigating the adverse impacts of outliers and burst traffic noise. Subsequently, we design an advanced architecture that integrates self-normalizing residual blocks with a channel attention mechanism. Leveraging compressed hidden layers alongside the Scaled Exponential Linear Unit (SELU) activation function, this architecture not only mitigates the vanishing gradient problem but also amplifies critical traffic features. Concurrently, it achieves a substantial reduction in both parameter count and inference latency. Furthermore, we introduce a cosine annealing strategy to dynamically adjust the learning rate during training, thereby facilitating the model’s escape from local optima and accelerating convergence. Extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves superior detection accuracy while maintaining exceptional computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Cui et al. (Mon,) studied this question.