Motivation

The nmeta project is motivated by a real world problem in enterprise networks. The rapidly increasing number and types of networked devices is challenging the effectiveness of traditional static traffic classification techniques.

Traffic classification is the allocation of packets to types, and in enterprise networks this is commonly used as an input into Quality of Service (QoS) treatment, but may also be used for other purposes such as security and billing

Current traffic classification techniques require network operators to understand the characteristics of each flow type however this is becoming untenable due to the sheer volume of different flow types.