How to measure reliability and quality of IP multicast services?

IP multicast is the most often used technique to transport multimedia data over the Internet. Due to the low resource requirements when transmitting one multimedia stream to more than just one client, it is deployed in most backbone networks as well as in most campus networks. Typical services are video broadcasts or video conferences. IP multicast, like IP, does not support transporting realtime data with a specified QoS. It is a best effort transport network, but there are some approaches to put some quality to IP to provide a better quality of service. Network administrators need information about the reliability of their network. For both measurements, there are a lot of tools available and the number of such tools is still growing. The problem is that the whole Internet cannot be measured to apply these data to all possible services (applications). This paper describes a way to identify the components required for a particular service. Using this knowledge, the available tools can be used to set up measurements of network reliability and QoS for this service.