RSVP-TE Overview

RSVP is a protocol that defines procedures for signaling QoS (Quality of Service) requirements and reserving the necessary resources for a router to provide a requested service to all nodes along a data path. This release supports inter-area RSVP tunnels.
Note

Note

Partial path computation for FRR over multiple OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) areas is not supported.

RSVP is not a routing protocol. It works in conjunction with unicast and multicast routing protocols. An RSVP process consults a local routing database to obtain routing information. Routing protocols determine where packets get forwarded; RSVP is concerned with the QoS of those packets that are forwarded in accordance with the routing protocol.

Reservation requests for a flow follow the same path through the network as the data comprising the flow. RSVP reservations are unidirectional in nature, and the source initiates the reservation procedure by transmitting a path message containing a traffic specification (Tspec) object. The Tspec describes the source traffic characteristics in terms of peak data rate, average data rate, burst size, and minimum/maximum packet sizes.

RSVP-TE is a set of traffic engineering extensions to RSVP. RSVP-TE extensions enable RSVP use for traffic engineering in MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) environments. The primary extensions add support for assigning MPLS labels and specifying explicit paths as a sequence of loose and strict routes. These extensions are supported by including label request and explicit route objects in the path message. A destination responds to a label request by including a label object in its reserve message. Labels are then subsequently assigned at each node the reserve message traverses. Thus, RSVP-TE operates in downstream-on-demand label advertisement mode with ordered LSP control.

The ExtremeXOS software implementation of RSVP-TE complies with RFC 3209 and includes support for: