A case for dynamic sender-based reservations in the Internet

In this paper we discuss the need for resource reservation in the Internet and examine some of the strengths and weaknesses of RSVP, which is currently the most popular of Internet reservation protocols that have been developed. We also discuss some alternative reservation protocols for packet networks, in particular the ATM Block Transfer(ABT) reservation protocol that has been designed for use in Asynchronous Transfer Mode(ATM) networks and which uses ‘in-line’ control packets to modify reservations ‘on the fly’ to achieve very efficient bandwidth utilisation. Finally we present a proposal for a new reservation protocol, known as DRP(Dynamic Reservation Protocol) which combines many of the strengths of RSVP and ABT with few of the weaknesses to achieve a highly bandwidth-efficient reservation mechanism with excellent scalability with regards to round trip time, data rate and number of hosts. This paper was published in The Journal of High Speed Networks in late 1998.