Probe-based admission control for a differentiated-services internet

End-point admission control solutions have been proposed to meet quality requirements of audio-visual applications with little support from routers. These proposals decentralize the admission decision by requiring each host or access gateway to probe the network before sending data. In this paper we describe a probe-based admission control scheme that offers a reliable upper bound on packet loss, as well as small end-to-end delay and delay jitter. The admission control supports host mobility and multicast communications without adding any complexity to the network nodes. We present a mathematical analysis which relates system performance to design parameters and which can be used as a dimensioning aid for the system. Finally, we describe performance results from an experimental prototype as well as simulations that prove that the scheme provides a reliable and efficient solution for QoS provisioning for delay and loss sensitive applications.