RSVP
ReSerVation Protocol


The RSVP protocol is part of a larger effort to enhance the current Internet architecture with support for Quality of Service flows. The RSVP protocol is used by a host to request specific qualities of service from the network for particular application data streams or flows. RSVP is also used by routers to deliver quality-of-service (QoS) requests to all nodes along the path(s) of the flows and to establish and maintain state to provide the requested service. RSVP requests will generally result in resources being reserved in each node along the data path.

Version 1 of RSVP has been specified in RFC 2205 and several ancillary RFCs (see Publications), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has reached consensus on the RSVP specification documents as Internet Proposed Standards.

USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) has taken a leading role in the development of RSVP and Internet Integrated Services. Much of this work has been done under two successive RSVP projects which were funded by DARPA ITO.

A new survey of RSVP implementations is available that includes the status of many commercial implementations of RSVP.


Last modified: March 5, 1999
Steven Berson - berson [at] isi [dot] edu