FlowXpert: Context-Aware Flow Embedding for Enhanced Traffic Detection in IoT Network

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, continuous interaction among a large number of devices generates complex and dynamic network traffic, which poses significant challenges to rule-based detection approaches. Machine learning (ML)-based traffic detection technology, capable of identifying anomalous patterns and potential threats within this traffic, serves as a critical component in ensuring network security. This study first identifies a significant issue with widely adopted feature extraction tools (e.g., CICMeterFlow): the extensive use of time- and length-related features leads to high sparsity, which adversely affects model convergence. Furthermore, existing traffic detection methods generally lack an embedding mechanism capable of efficiently and comprehensively capturing the semantic characteristics of network traffic. To address these challenges, we propose a novel feature extraction tool that eliminates traditional time and length features in favor of context-aware semantic features related to the source host, thus improving the generalizability of the model. In addition, we design an embedding training framework that integrates the unsupervised DBSCAN clustering algorithm with a contrastive learning strategy to effectively capture fine-grained semantic representations of traffic. Extensive empirical evaluations are conducted on the real-world Mawi data set to validate the proposed method in terms of detection accuracy, robustness, and generalization. Comparative experiments against several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models demonstrate the superior performance of our approach. Furthermore, we confirm its applicability and deployability in real-time scenarios.