On the Stability of the Information Carried by Traffic Flow Features at the Packet Level

This paper presents a statistical analysis of the amount of information that the features of traffic flows observed at the packet-level carry, with respect to the protocol that generated them. We show that the amount of information of the majority of such features remain constant irrespective of the point of observation (Internet core vs. Internet edge) and to the capture time (year 2000/01 vs. year 2008). We also describe a comparative analysis of how four statistical classifiers fare using the features we studied.