The RSVP refresh reduction feature consists of the following capabilities implemented in accordance to RFC 2961, RSVP Refresh Overhead Reduction Extensions:
RSVP message bundling — This capability is intended to reduce overall message handling load. The system supports receipt and processing of bundled message only, but no transmission of bundled messages.
Reliable message delivery — This capability consists of sending a message-id and returning a message-ack for each RSVP message. It can be used to detect message loss and support reliable RSVP message delivery on a per hop basis. It also helps reduce the refresh rate because the delivery becomes more reliable.
Summary refresh — This capability consists of refreshing multiples states with a single message-id list and sending negative ACKs (NACKs) for a message_id which could not be matched. The summary refresh capability reduce the amount of messaging exchanged and the corresponding message processing between peers. It does not however reduce the amount of soft state to be stored in the node.
These capabilities can be enabled on a per-RSVP-interface basis are referred to collectively as ‟refresh overhead reduction extensions”. When the refresh-reduction is enabled on a system RSVP interface, the node indicates this to its peer by setting a refresh-reduction- capable bit in the flags field of the common RSVP header. If both peers of an RSVP interface set this bit, all the above three capabilities can be used. Furthermore, the node monitors the settings of this bit in received RSVP messages from the peer on the interface. As soon as this bit is cleared, the node stops sending summary refresh messages. If a peer did not set the ‟refresh-reduction-capable” bit, a node does not attempt to send summary refresh messages.
The RSVP Overhead Refresh Reduction is supported with both RSVP P2P LSP path and the S2L path of an RSVP P2MP LSP instance over the same RSVP interface.