An experimental investigation of the Internet integrated services model using the resource reservation protocol (RSVP)

The Internet Protocol (IP) in use today was designed to offer network applications a best-effort delivery service for network traffic and no guarantees are made as to when or if the packets will be delivered to their final destination. Many new network applications need the network to meet certain delay and packet loss requirements, but the current best-effort delivery service does not have the ability to provide this level of service. The Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed the Internet integrated services (IIS) model to allocate network resources achieving the desired service and the resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) to deliver requests on behalf of the application for these resources. The basic concepts of the IIS model and RSVP are described. An experiment is presented in which the network performance is evaluated, both with and without network resource allocation, under varying degrees of load with the purpose of assessing the benefits of resource allocation for particular data flows.