Mini-IPC: A Minimalist Approach for HTTP Traffic Classification using IP Addresses

The popularity of web-based services and multimedia applications like YouTube, Google Web Search, Facebook, and a bewildering range of Internet applications has taken HTTP back to the pole position on end-user traffic consumption. Today’s Internet users exchange most of their content via HTTP. In this paper we address the problem of on-line HTTP traffic classification from network measurements. Building on the results provided by HTTPTag, a flexible system for on-line HTTP classification, we present and explore Mini-IPC. Mini-IPC is a minimalist approach for classifying HTTP flows using only the IP addresses of the servers hosting the corresponding content. Using one full week of HTTP traffic traces collected at the mobile broadband network of a major European ISP, we investigate to which extent the most popular HTTP-based services are hosted by well-defined sets of IP addresses, and evaluate the performance of Mini-IPC to classify these services using IPs only.