Performance evaluation of the RSVP reservation aggregation model

Abstract

This paper contains an evaluation of the RSVP Reservation Aggregation architecture, proposed by the IETF as a scalable alternative to the standard RSVP/IntServ for usage in high-speed core networks. We point out its main strengths, weaknesses and limitations, and describe our implementation of the architecture in the ns-2 simulator, including the definition of policies which are considered out of the scope of RFC3175, of which the most important is the aggregate bandwidth management policy. The simulation results confirm that the architecture is able to meet the QoS requirements of a controlled load service class with much lighter classification, forwarding and signalling procedures than RSVP/IntServ. They also demonstrate that the scalability comes at the price of a lower utilization of network resources. We further provide some guidelines for setting the tunable parameters, bulk size and hysteresis time, based on the analysis of the simulation results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.