Integrated services

Integrated Services (IS) is a dynamic resource reservation model for the Internet described in RFC 1633.

Hosts use a signaling protocol called Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) to dynamically request a specific quality of service from the network. QoS parameters are carried in these RSVP messages and each network node along the path installs the parameters to obtain the requested quality of service. These QoS parameters describe one of two currently defined services, guaranteed service and controlled-load service. An important characteristic of IS is that this signaling is done for each traffic flow and reservations are installed at each hop along the route. Although this model is well-suited for meeting the dynamically changing needs of applications, there exist some significant scaling issues that imply it cannot be deployed in a network in which single routers handle many simultaneous flows.