Measurements and Observations of IP Multicast Traffic
			     Bruce A. Mah
			 bmah@CS.Berkeley.EDU
			   The Tenet Group
		 University of California at Berkeley
				 and
	       International Computer Science Institute

			       ABSTRACT

In this report, we present measurements of IP multicast traffic taken
at the University of California at Berkeley.  We note that the volume
and distribution of IP multicast traffic is highly variable, and can
depend on a small number of active conversations.  From examining
many-way multimedia conferences, we note the need for some kind of
conference control, either provided by the application or the users.
We see that IP multicast conferencing traffic can exhibit
characteristics very different from that of conventional wide-area
data traffic.  Finally, we show that scope control (controlling the
extent of the propagation of data through the network) must be
addressed by the network, because users have been seen to mismanage
the scopes of their own transmissions.