Generalizable IoT Traffic Representations for Cross-Network Device Identification
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866908791109320704 |
|---|---|
| author | Sivanathan, Arunan Warren, David Mishra, Deepak Ruj, Sushmita Fernandes, Natasha Sheng, Quan Z. Tran, Minh Luo, Ben Coscia, Daniel Batista, Gustavo Gharakaheili, Hassan Habibi |
| author_facet | Sivanathan, Arunan Warren, David Mishra, Deepak Ruj, Sushmita Fernandes, Natasha Sheng, Quan Z. Tran, Minh Luo, Ben Coscia, Daniel Batista, Gustavo Gharakaheili, Hassan Habibi |
| contents | Machine learning models have demonstrated strong performance in classifying network traffic and identifying Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, enabling operators to discover and manage IoT assets at scale. However, many existing approaches rely on end-to-end supervised pipelines or task-specific fine-tuning, resulting in traffic representations that are tightly coupled to labeled datasets and deployment environments, which can limit generalizability. In this paper, we study the problem of learning generalizable traffic representations for IoT device identification. We design compact encoder architectures that learn per-flow embeddings from unlabeled IoT traffic and evaluate them using a frozen-encoder protocol with a simple supervised classifier. Our specific contributions are threefold. (1) We develop unsupervised encoder--decoder models that learn compact traffic representations from unlabeled IoT network flows and assess their quality through reconstruction-based analysis. (2) We show that these learned representations can be used effectively for IoT device-type classification using simple, lightweight classifiers trained on frozen embeddings. (3) We provide a systematic benchmarking study against the state-of-the-art pretrained traffic encoders, showing that larger models do not necessarily yield more robust representations for IoT traffic. Using more than 18 million real IoT traffic flows collected across multiple years and deployment environments, we learn traffic representations from unlabeled data and evaluate device-type classification on disjoint labeled subsets, achieving macro F1-scores exceeding 0.9 for device-type classification and demonstrating robustness under cross-environment deployment. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19315 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Generalizable IoT Traffic Representations for Cross-Network Device Identification Sivanathan, Arunan Warren, David Mishra, Deepak Ruj, Sushmita Fernandes, Natasha Sheng, Quan Z. Tran, Minh Luo, Ben Coscia, Daniel Batista, Gustavo Gharakaheili, Hassan Habibi Machine Learning 68M12, 68T05 C.2.3; I.2.6; I.5.1 Machine learning models have demonstrated strong performance in classifying network traffic and identifying Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, enabling operators to discover and manage IoT assets at scale. However, many existing approaches rely on end-to-end supervised pipelines or task-specific fine-tuning, resulting in traffic representations that are tightly coupled to labeled datasets and deployment environments, which can limit generalizability. In this paper, we study the problem of learning generalizable traffic representations for IoT device identification. We design compact encoder architectures that learn per-flow embeddings from unlabeled IoT traffic and evaluate them using a frozen-encoder protocol with a simple supervised classifier. Our specific contributions are threefold. (1) We develop unsupervised encoder--decoder models that learn compact traffic representations from unlabeled IoT network flows and assess their quality through reconstruction-based analysis. (2) We show that these learned representations can be used effectively for IoT device-type classification using simple, lightweight classifiers trained on frozen embeddings. (3) We provide a systematic benchmarking study against the state-of-the-art pretrained traffic encoders, showing that larger models do not necessarily yield more robust representations for IoT traffic. Using more than 18 million real IoT traffic flows collected across multiple years and deployment environments, we learn traffic representations from unlabeled data and evaluate device-type classification on disjoint labeled subsets, achieving macro F1-scores exceeding 0.9 for device-type classification and demonstrating robustness under cross-environment deployment. |
| title | Generalizable IoT Traffic Representations for Cross-Network Device Identification |
| topic | Machine Learning 68M12, 68T05 C.2.3; I.2.6; I.5.1 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19315 |