Aggregate RSVP implementation experience and performance analysis for applicability in tactical IP networks

Differentiated services (DiffServ), dynamic flow admission control, and multi-level priority and preemption (MLPP) capabilities provide an architectural foundation for quality of service (QoS) in tactical networks, collectively working to optimize the utilization of tactical links, subject to variable impairments. Admission control assures QoS by admitting traffic only within available capacity; inevitably, it has to adapt to varying link state. As a periodically refreshed distributed protocol, resource reservation protocol (RSVP) is adaptive to route/bandwidth variations end-to-end (E2E), but has known scalability issues. Aggregate RSVP (ARSVP) proposes to address this limitation by merging similar micro flows into few flow aggregates, thus reducing state. In this paper, we present our implementation experience and empirical analysis of ARSVP to evaluate its scalability premise as a candidate admission control mechanism in multi-domain tactical networks.