Network traffic is the reflection of human’s activities in cyberspace - understanding how network services are used and how they are operating is critical to cyberspace governance, service optimization, and cyberthreat elimination. Network traffic analysis is central for this goal, which can help to detect network attacks, manage network resources, or improve the quality of network services.

Nevertheless, with the popularization of encrypted network protocols, and the diversity of network protocols employed in different scenarios, network traffic analysis has become a challenging field. Traditional traffic engineering requires large amounts of sophisticated expertise to deal with complicated traffic analysis tasks. More efficient traffic analysis schemes transform artificial expertise to representative models with the aid of machine learning methods and historical network traffic, deep learning specifically has been studied to solve many typical network traffic analysis tasks, which have proven to be a potential general framework for network traffic analysis. Therefore, with the increasing volume of network traffic in the high-speed network period, research on intelligent network traffic analysis is significantly important to network management and security.

The aim of this Special Issue is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of problems and solution guidelines emerging in intelligent network traffic analysis. Original research articles with a focus on both practical as well as on theoretical topics and problems, as well as review articles, are welcome.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Fundamental theory of network traffic analysis
• Overall framework for network traffic analysis
• Machine learning approach for network traffic analysis
• Big data analysis for network traffic
• Automated meta-data analysis of non-encrypted network traffic
• Identification of encrypted network traffic
• Network management with traffic analysis
• Network attack detection with traffic analysis
• Botnet detection with network traffic analysis
• User behavior analysis with network traffic analysis
• Network topology recovery with network traffic analysis
• Traffic analysis technology for IoT devices
• Traffic analysis technology for mobile internet
• Network traffic analysis in 5G/B5G/6G