Securing RSVP and RSVP-TE signaling protocols and their performance study

RSVP and RSVP-TE are signaling protocols used to set up paths and/or support quality of service (QoS) requirements in IP and MPLS-based networks, respectively. This paper analyzes an authentication mechanism for securing the RSVP and RSVP-TE control messages, and studies their performance. This design and implementation of the authentication mechanism, which is based on RFC2747, using four commonly adopted hash algorithms - MD5, RIPEMD160, SHA-1, and SHA-256, not only improves security, but also provides useful information from the performance aspect. The time for authenticating the signaling messages depends on the algorithm used, and increases slightly in the order of MD5, SHA-1, RIPEMD160 and SHA-256. The performance of the RSVP-TE with multiple sessions was measured.