Once a signaled LSP is enabled at the ingress LER, the router persistently attempts to establish the LSP through periodic retries until the LSP is successfully established. To maintain the forwarding states and resource reservations on the routers in an LSP, Path and Resv messages are exchanged between neighboring LSRs at regular intervals. When these refresh messages are not received on the routers in the LSP, the RSVP forwarding states and resource reservations are removed. The user can control how often the Path and Resv messages are sent, as well as how long the device waits before removing forwarding states and resource reservations. The user can also use reliable messaging and refresh reduction to reduce RSVP message bandwidth and improve the dependability of RSVP paths and reservations states.