Overview

The RSVP Agent provides an RSVP application programming interface (RAPI) for QoS-aware applications to use. Applications use RAPI to register their intent to use RSVP services, to describe their data traffic, and to explicitly request that network resources be reserved on their behalf. The RSVP Agent communicates with its peers (other RSVP Agents running on z/OS® or other platforms) in the network, with QoS-aware sender and receiver applications, and with the TCP/IP stack to affect resource reservations. See RFC 2205 for more information about RSVP, and z/OS Communications Server: IP Programmer's Guide and Reference for more information about RAPI.

The following terms must be defined to understand RSVP processing:
Quality of Service (QoS)
The overall service that a user or application receives from a network, in terms of throughput, delay, and such.
QoS-Aware Application
An application that explicitly requests QoS services from the RSVP agent.
Service Differentiation
The ability of a network to provide different levels of QoS to different users or applications based on their needs.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A contract in business terms provided by a network service provider that details the QoS that users or applications are expected to receive.
Service Policy
Administrative controls for a network, in order to achieve the QoS promised by a given SLA.
Integrated Services
A type of service that provides end-to-end QoS to an application, using the methodology of resource reservation along the data path from a receiver to a sender.
Differentiated Services
A type of service that provides QoS to broad classes of traffic or users, for example all FTP traffic to a given subnet.
Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP)
A protocol that provides for resource reservation in support of Integrated Services.