Providing multicast quality of service through resource reservation protocol

New multimedia applications emerge daily and these have stringent quality of service requirements. These service requirements are not satisfied by best-effort service except under low utilization conditions. These applications generally benefit from the bandwidth efficiency of multicast technology.; Our emphasis is on audio/video multicast applications and how to meet quality guarantees that these applications demand. In particular, we study the performance benefits of employing the Resource ReSerVation Protocol for such applications.; Our results indicate significant delay performance improvements for moderate to high utilization levels. This is found promising in that quality of service may be delivered to such applications with little impact on the existing network infrastructure, i.e., without the need for deployment of all-new quality of service-aware multicast routing protocols.; Consequently, we give a preliminary discussion of such a low-impact scheme, which is roughly based on using success/failure of reservation requests as indication of good/bad quality.