Multicast topology inference and its applications

As networks continue to grow explosively both in size and internal complexity, the ever increasing tremendous traffic load and applications drive researchers to develop techniques for analyzing network performance and managing network resources for optimal usage. All these tasks require that end-systems know the internal network characteristics. Discovery of internal information such as topology and localized lossy links plays an important role in resource management, loss recovery, and congestion control [1–3]. As a result of this different techniques have been developed to identify the internal characteristics of networks.