Benchmarking of signaling based resource reservation in the internet

Abstract

This paper investigates the scalability limitations of IP resource reservation protocols using RSVP and Boomerang as examples. The memory and processing time consumption of signaling message primitives were measured as a function of the total number of concurrent reservation sessions on PC-based routers running Linux and on a commercial router. The signaling handling algorithm of the implementations were analyzed as well and critical operations were identified. Our results show that CPU time is a more significant scalability concern than the router memory and also that the former is very dependent on the implementation and complexity of the signaling algorithm. Thus the same Linux PC can handle Boomerang reservation requests several hundred times faster than RSVP requests.