Towards Robust SDN Security: A Comparative Analysis of Oversampling Techniques with ML and DL Classifiers

Software-defined networking (SDN) is becoming a predominant architecture for managing diverse networks. However, recent research has exhibited the susceptibility of SDN architectures to cyberattacks, which increases its security challenges. Many researchers have used machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) classifiers to mitigate cyberattacks in SDN architectures. Since SDN datasets could suffer from class imbalance issues, the classification accuracy of predictive classifiers is undermined. Therefore, this research conducts a comparative analysis of the impact of utilizing oversampling and principal component analysis (PCA) techniques on ML and DL classifiers using publicly available SDN datasets. This approach combines mitigating the class imbalance issue and maintaining the effectiveness of the performance when reducing data dimensionality. Initially, the oversampling techniques are used to balance the classes of the SDN datasets. Then, the classification performance of ML and DL classifiers is evaluated and compared to observe the effectiveness of each oversampling technique on each classifier. PCA is applied to the balanced dataset, and the classifier’s performance is evaluated and compared. The results demonstrated that Random Oversampling outperformed the other balancing techniques. Furthermore, the XGBoost and Transformer classifiers were the most sensitive models when using oversampling and PCA algorithms. In addition, macro and weighted averages of evaluation metrics were calculated to show the impact of imbalanced class datasets on each classifier.