Sensitive data, such as financial, personal, or classified governmental information, must be protected throughout its cycle. This paper studies the problem of safeguarding transmitted data based on data categorization techniques. This research aims to use a novel routine as a new meta-heuristic to enhance a novel data categorization based-traffic classification technique where private data is classified into multiple confidential levels. As a result, two packets belonging to the same confidentiality level cannot be transmitted through two routers simultaneously, ensuring a high data protection level. Such a problem is determined by a non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness (NP-hard) problem; therefore, a scheduling algorithm is applied to minimize the total transmission time over the two considered routers. To measure the proposed scheme's performance, two types of distribution, uniform and binomial distributions used to generate packets transmission time datasets. The experimental result shows that the most efficient algorithm is the Best-Random Algorithm ([Formula: see text]), recording 0.028 s with an average gap of less than 0.001 in 95.1% of cases compared to all proposed algorithms. In addition, [Formula: see text] is compared to the best-proposed algorithm in the literature which is the Modified decreasing Estimated-Transmission Time algorithm (MDETA). The results show that [Formula: see text] is the best one in 100% of cases where MDETA reaches the best results in only 48%.
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