Characterizing UDP Consecutive Packet Losses in Multicast Networks

The Internet\´s explosive growth was spurred by a variety of new and emerging applications and the simultaneous exponential growth of the Internet user community. In particular, multimedia applications are becoming increasingly important in the Internet and this makes the ubiquitous deployment of multicast, native or otherwise, an imminent event. As such, it is important to understand multicast traffic. This paper examines UDP consecutive packet losses and finds that this burst loss characteristic conforms approximately to the head of a geometric distribution which facilitates the derivation of an "ideal" burst loss distribution, assuming an ideal multicast network with no stray long burst losses.