Traffic classification is an important tool for network management. It reveals the source of observed network traffic and has many potential applications e.g. in Quality of Service, network security and traffic visualization. In the last decade, traffic classification evolved quickly due to the raise of peer-to-peer traffic. Nowadays, researchers still find new methods in order to withstand the rapid changes of the Internet. In this paper, we review 13 publications on traffic classification and related topics that were published during 2009-2012. We show diversity in recent algorithms and we highlight possible directions for the future research on traffic classification: relevance of multi-level classification, importance of experimental validation, and the need for common traffic datasets.

The article introduces a novel Internet diagnosis utility - an open source IP packet snifferwhich captures TCP and UDP packets sent and received by a single Linux process only. Preliminary evaluation results are presented. The utility can be applied in the field of IP traffic classification.