Lossy link identification for multicast network

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comUse of multicast traffic as measurement probes has been shown effective to infer network-internal characteristics. In a network the links that have a packet loss rate greater than a given threshold are called lossy links. Lossy links adversely affect network performance and collectively cause break-down of network service in many cases. We propose a new approach to identify the lossy links from multicast end-to-end measurements. It is based on hamming distance of sequences on receipt/loss of probe packets maintained at each pair of sibling nodes. With prior knowledge of multicast network topology, all lossy links can be effectively identified by our approach.Hui Tian and Hong She