Packet switched networks, especially IP-based networks, continue to grow world wide at a formidable pace. This is in part due to their efficiency at carrying all the traffic generated by popular applications such as the WWW and the electronic mail. However, quality of service (QoS) sensitive applications such as multimedia communication applications are not as widely spread in the Internet because of the discrepancies between their specific requirements and the inherent characteristics of IP networks. Indeed the effective transmission of video or voice for real-time decoding requires QoS guarantees from the underlying transport mechanisms. This paper proposes a framework for the efficient transmission of video traffic through IP-based networks. The IETF's Integrated Services is used as a QoS architecture to provide specific QoS guarantees to the video flow. Specifically, the Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) allows the end user to request deterministic QoS guarantees from the network. In the evaluation phase of the experimental work, we evaluate the performance of an RSVP-aware switching point for video transmission under different load conditions. In particular, the QoS provided is evaluated in terms of the video frame inter-arrival times and the packet forwarding delay at the router node. Our experimental results show that RSVP is able to protect the real-time traffic during times of congestion. Also, under light load conditions, the traffic control mechanism exhibits some slight overhead. Finally, the use scalable video fits pretty well with the use of a wide diversity of resources, an inherent characteristic of the Internet.