Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Encrypted Traffic Classification on Resource-Constrained Devices

This paper presents a hardware-efficient deep neural network (DNN), optimized through hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW-NAS); the DNN supports the classification of session-level encrypted traffic on resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices. Thanks to HW-NAS, a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) is tailored on the ISCX VPN-nonVPN dataset to meet strict memory and computational limits while achieving robust performance. The optimized model attains an accuracy of 96.60% with just 88.26K parameters, 10.08M floating-point operations (FLOPs), and a maximum tensor size of 20.12K. Compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, it achieves reductions of up to 444-fold, 312-fold, and 15-fold in these metrics, respectively, significantly minimizing memory footprint and runtime requirements. The model also demonstrates versatility, achieving up to 99.86% across multiple VPN and traffic classification (TC) tasks; it further generalizes to external benchmarks with up to 99.98% accuracy on USTC-TFC and QUIC NetFlow. In addition, an in-depth approach to header-level preprocessing strategies confirms that the optimized model can provide notable performance across a wide range of configurations, even in scenarios with stricter privacy considerations. Likewise, a reduction in the length of sessions of up to 75% yields significant improvements in efficiency while maintaining high accuracy with only a negligible drop of 1-2%. However, the importance of careful preprocessing and session length selection in the classification of raw traffic data is still present, as improper settings or aggressive reductions can bring about a 7% reduction in overall accuracy. The quantized architecture was deployed on STM32 microcontrollers and evaluated across input sizes; results confirm that the efficiency gains from shorter sessions translate to practical, low-latency embedded inference. These findings demonstrate the method's practicality for encrypted traffic analysis in constrained IoT networks.