In general, techniques are described for simplifying admission control signaling between subscriber devices, access nodes, and service edge routers to facilitate subscriber-specific admission control for multicast streams. In one example, a service edge router receives a service request and accesses a subscriber profile to determine whether the requesting subscriber is authorized to receive the service. Upon authorization, the service edge router returns the service request to the access node in a substantially similar form in which the service request was received. The access node receives the service request on a service edge router-facing interface, indicating the service edge router has granted authorization for the subscriber device to receive multicast traffic associated with the multicast group identified within the service request. The access node therefore modifies internal mapping tables that determine local elaboration of multicast traffic associated with the multicast group to include an interface to the subscriber device.