A performance study of RSVP with proposed extensions

Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) was developed as an intended key component for the evolving Internet, and in particular for the Integrated Services architecture. Therefore, RSVP performance is crucially important; yet this has been little studied up till now. In this paper, we target two of the most important aspects of RSVP: its ability to establish flows and its steady-state overhead. We first identify the factors influencing the performance of the protocol by modelling the establishment mechanism. Then, we propose the principles of a Fast Establishment Mechanism (FEM) aimed at speeding up the set-up procedure in RSVP. We analyse FEM by means of simulation, and show that it offers improvements to the performance of RSVP over a range of likely circumstances. We also present the principles of a simple mechanism aimed at reducing the steady-state (i.e. refresh) message overhead of RSVP.