RSVP: general-purpose signaling for IP

In the mid-1990s, the Resource Reservation Protocol was touted as the IP counterpoint to ATM's QoS superiority. The lack of RSVP-enabled applications and of scalable network machinery, however, eventually made it appear to be an "emperor with no clothes". But RSVP is making a quiet comeback thanks to developments like Winsock2, which gives applications developers a standard API for invoking RSVP reservation setup requests.