ALF-MoE: An Attention-Based Learnable Fusion of Specialized Expert Networks for Accurate Traffic Classification

Traffic classification remains a critical challenge in the Internet of Things (IoT), particularly for enhancing security and ensuring Quality of Service (QoS). Although deep learning methods have shown strong performance in traffic classification, learning diverse and complementary representations across heterogeneous network traffic patterns remains difficult. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for multiclass traffic classification in IoT environments. The proposed model integrates five specialized expert networks, each targeting a distinct feature category in network traffic. Specifically, it employs a Dense Neural Network for general features, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for spatial patterns, a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-based model for statistical variations, a Convolutional Autoencoder (CAE) for frequency-domain representations, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for temporal dependencies. A dynamic gating mechanism, coupled with an Attention-based Learnable Fusion (ALF) module, adaptively aggregates the experts’ outputs to produce the final classification decision. The proposed ALF-MoE model was evaluated on three public benchmark datasets, such as ISCX VPN-nonVPN, Unicauca, and UNSW-IoTraffic, achieving accuracies of 98.43%, 98.96%, and 97.93%, respectively. These results confirm its effectiveness and reliability across diverse scenarios. It also outperforms baseline methods in terms of its accuracy and the F1-score.