Probe-based admission control for multicast

End-to-end measurement based admission controls (MBAC) have recently been proposed to support quality of service for real-time transfer of data. All these designs share the idea of decentralizing the admission decision by requiring each end host to probe the network before transmission. These schemes are solely targeted at unicast communications, while multicast data has not yet been addressed. We study a probing procedure to perform admission decisions for multicast senders and receivers. The admission control offers a reliable upper bound on the packet loss for the multicast session even with short probe phase durations (e.g. half a second). Our probing mechanism only requires the routers to differentiate between two classes of packets: high priority data and low priority probes. Simulation results of the performance of the procedure are presented and evaluated.