Internet packet loss: measurement and implications for end-to-end QoS

We analyze a month of Internet packet loss statistics for speech transmission using three different sets of transmitter/receiver host pairs. Our results indicate that packet loss is highly bursty, with the majority of individual losses occurring in a relatively small number of bursts. We find that loss exhibits dependence in most cases, but is not always well modeled as dependent. We introduce an analytical technique for measuring loss dependency. We also consider the asymmetry of round trip packet loss, and find that most loss on a round trip path occurs in either one direction or the other. We introduce a normalized metric for measuring loss asymmetry and apply it to our measurements. Finally we discuss the implications of our study for the next generation of real time voice services in the Internet.