Sometimes, network traffic is dropped without the source ever being informed that the traffic never reached its intended target. The error can only be detected by monitoring network traffic. Such a situation is referred to as a black hole.
One such scenario is when a host tries to connect to an IP address that was assigned to a host that is down or to an IP address that was never assigned to a host. Although TCP has mechanisms for communicating a failure to connect back to the original host, often the packets are just dropped. Moreover, if you are using a protocol such as UDP that is both connectionless and unreliable, then there are no means of communicating back to the original host that the IP address is dead.
Another common ...
