Lossy link identification for multicast network

Abstract

Use 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.