The traffic behavior of University of Louisville network with the interconnected backbone routers and the number of Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) subnets is investigated using the Random Matrix Theory (RMT) approach. We employ the system of equal interval time series of traffic counts at all router to router and router to subnet connections as a representation of the inter-VLAN traffic. The cross-correlation matrix C of the traffic rate changes between different traffic time series is calculated and tested against null-hypothesis of random interactions. The majority of the eigenvalues i of matrix C fall within the bounds predicted by the RMT for the eigenvalues of random correlation matrices. The distribution of eigenvalues and eigenvectors outside of the RMT bounds displays prominent and systematic deviations from the RMT predictions. Moreover, these deviations are stable in time. The method we use provides a unique possibility to accomplish three concurrent tasks of traffic analysis. The method verifies the uncongested state of the network, by establishing the profile of random interactions. It recognizes the system-specific large-scale interactions, by establishing the profile of stable in time non-random interactions. Finally, by looking into the eigenstatistics we are able to detect and allocate anomalies of network traffic interactions.
The same group of researchers extended their work in @cite_20 . Under the new assumption that any network anomaly induces the changes in distributional aspects of packet header fields, they detected and identified large set of anomalies using the entropy measurement tool.
@cite_20
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The increasing practicality of large-scale flow capture makes it possible to conceive of traffic analysis methods that detect and identify a large and diverse set of anomalies. However the challenge of effectively analyzing this massive data source for anomaly diagnosis is as yet unmet. We argue that the distributions of packet features (IP addresses and ports) observed in flow traces reveals both the presence and the structure of a wide range of anomalies. Using entropy as a summarization tool, we show that the analysis of feature distributions leads to significant advances on two fronts: (1) it enables highly sensitive detection of a wide range of anomalies, augmenting detections by volume-based methods, and (2) it enables automatic classification of anomalies via unsupervised learning. We show that using feature distributions, anomalies naturally fall into distinct and meaningful clusters. These clusters can be used to automatically classify anomalies and to uncover new anomaly types. We validate our claims on data from two backbone networks (Abilene and Geant) and conclude that feature distributions show promise as a key element of a fairly general network anomaly diagnosis framework.