A survey of UDP packet loss characteristics

Real time audio and video applications, though sensitive to packet loss and delay, do not require absolute reliability for transmission. Thus, understanding packet loss characteristics in the Internet, as well as in the MBone, can provide network researchers with an ability to design improved protocols for error control/concealment. This paper presents an analysis of real traffic measurements from the Internet/MBone, giving details of loss rates and packet loss characteristics of different receivers from different geographical regions. The analysis reveals that some receivers experience very high loss rate, of above 25%, and that a high percentage of these packet losses are burst losses of several consecutive packets.