IETF RFC 3209 PDF

This document describes the use of RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol), including all the necessary extensions, to establish label-switched paths (LSPs) in MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching). Since the flow along an LSP is completely identified by the label applied at the ingress node of the path, these paths may be treated as tunnels. A key application of LSP tunnels is traffic engineering with MPLS as specified in RFC 2702.

We propose several additional objects that extend RSVP, allowing the establishment of explicitly routed label switched paths using RSVP as a signaling protocol. The result is the instantiation of labelswitched tunnels which can be automatically routed away from network failures, congestion, and bottlenecks.