7. Conclusion
This paper presented an approach to discover IP relationship to setup a clustering model based on IP connectivity of IP addresses inside the managed domain network based on their connectivity with the outside network by observing traffic at the border router. The objective is to setup hosts’ profiles, however, since it is not efficient to setup such profiles for each IP address, it is more effi- cient to discover clusters of IP addresses with similar behaviors. Instead of clustering hosts based on their traffic patterns, this paper proposed a clustering strategy based only on the IP connectivity without any information about protocol, port, packets. Our experimental results demonstrated that this approach can discover communities from real managed domain networks. The approach is discussed and evaluated using concepts from graph partitioning, such as modularity and community detection definitions, it has been also validated by deep flow inspection DFI. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first step forward in the research to discover social communities of IP networks by splitting network into inside and outside networks and discover communities’ structure among inside network based on similarity of connectivity with the outside networks. The proposed approach is implemented in a real network, and the quality of clustering significantly fulfilled our expectations. This work has practical benefits in network security, network management, and the monitoring and analysis of large networks. The future work will include improving the algorithm for further reduction in the calculations complexity of the proposed approach.