Flow Initiation and ReServation Tree (FIRST): a new Internet resource reservation protocol

The best effort service provided by the current Internet is not suitable for supporting real-time multimedia applications which require quality of service (QoS) guarantees. To provide QoS over the Internet, a reservation mechanism is required to reserve resources along the data-delivery path. In this paper, we give an overview of three Internet reservation protocols: RSVP, ST-2+ and YESSIR, and compare their features. With the aim of combining the advantages of the above reservation protocols, a new reservation protocol called Flow Initiation and ReServation Tree (FIRST) is proposed. The operations of FIRST are explained with a number of examples.