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 to transport 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. Also, the network administrators have to find out 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 you cannot measure the whole internet to apply these data to all possible services (applications). This paper describes an idea how to identify the components required for a particular service. Using this knowledge you can use the available tools to set up measurements for reliability and QoS of your network for this service.