Towards RSVP Lite: light-weight RSVP for generic signaling

Abstract

RSVP is a reservation setup protocol designed specifically to support QoS signaling in the Internet. However, RSVP end-to-end signaled QoS for the Internet has not become a reality. Moreover, there are many other applications demanding different signaling services. The paper analyses the features of RSVP version 1 we believe to be essential, and its complexity due to QoS-oriented design and multicast support as an indispensable component in a signaling protocol, deriving the design principles to be covered in a more generic signaling protocol. Based on this analysis, we present a light-weight version of RSVP, RSVP Lite, which clearly separates the signaled data from signaling messages and removes the multicast capability from the mandatory components of RSVP. RSVP Lite is intended to be applicable to a wide range of networking environments, while providing the flexibility to serve for generic signaling purposes and incremental deployment in the Internet.