An evaluation of RSVP control message delivery mechanisms

The paper compares a number of RSVP control message delivery mechanisms in terms of several performance metrics. It is found that, unsurprisingly, the default best effort delivery of RSVP messages performs poorly in the face of increasing network congestion. This poor performance may be ameliorated by reserving bandwidth for RSVP messages or by implementing a recently proposed exponential back-off retransmission algorithm. The relative performance of the different control message delivery mechanisms is quantified and explained. For further insight, the impact of the induced loss of Path or Resv messages is also investigated. Interesting trends are observed and explained. A key discovery is that the loss of Path messages is typically more detrimental than the loss of Resv messages. This finding, which suggests that, relatively speaking, it is more important to deliver Path messages reliably than Resv messages, is attributed to the dependency of Resv states on Path states mandated by the RSVP standards.