Implementation and evaluation of the cross-application signaling protocol (CASP)

We describe implementation aspects and performance results of a novel general signaling protocol for the Internet the cross-application signaling protocol (CASP). There has been much debate on the applicability of RSVP as a general signaling protocol for the Internet, particularly with respect to its modularity, complexity, security and mobility support. Based on a layered architecture, the CASP design intends to address these challenges, which, unlike RSVP, provides a simpler mechanism for reliability and security by reusing existing protocols for transporting signaling messages. In addition, it supports a wide range of signaling applications. While this concept is considered to be advantageous over RSVP signaling, the actual mechanisms and behaviors of the CASP implementation have not yet been explored. Our study attempts implementation and preliminary examination of its properties. Performance results show and analyze the round trip times and their variances of signaling messages upon different number of signaling requests and different congestion situations in the experimental setup. The memory required for a large number of signaling sessions and the CPU consumption for each routine from profiling the implementation are low. Although further work is necessary, critical design choices in CASP have been proven useful and practically feasible.