A Survey of Traffic Classification in Software Defined Networks

Traffic classification has been widely used in network management, service measurements, network design, security monitoring and advertising. Software defined networks (SDN) is an newly-developing technology, which is capable of address problems in the traditional network by simplifying network management, introducing network programmability, and providing a global view of a network. Recent years, SDN has brought new opportunity to classify traffic. Traffic classification techniques in SDN have been investigated, proposed and developed. This paper looks at emerging research into the traffic classification techniques in SDN. We first introduce SDN and related work of traffic classification, and then review several representative works of traffic classification in SDN. These works are reviewed in line with the choice of classification strategies and contribution to the literature. Research challenges and future directions for SDN traffic classification are also discussed.