A case for dynamic sender‐based reservations in the Internet

Article type: Research Article

Authors: White, Paul Patrick | Crowcroft, Jon

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK Tel.: +44 171 419 3701, +44 171 380 7296; E‐mail: p.white.cs.ucl.ac.uk, j.crowcroft.cs.ucl.ac.uk

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the need for resource reservation in the Internet and examine some of the strengths and weaknesses of RSVP, which is currently the most popular of Internet reservation protocols that have been developed. We also discuss some alternative reservation protocols for packet networks, in particular the ATM Block Transfer (ABT) reservation protocol that has been designed for use in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks and which uses ‘in‐line’ control packets to modify reservations ‘on the fly’ to achieve very efficient bandwidth utilisation. Finally, we present a proposal for a new reservation protocol, known as DRP (Dynamic Reservation Protocol) which combines many of the strengths of RSVP and ABT with few of the weaknesses to achieve a highly bandwidth‐efficient reservation mechanism with excellent scalability with regards to round trip time, data rate and number of hosts.

Journal: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 159-185, 1998