Patent ID: 7788354

Claim:
A method comprising: reserving a Quality of Service (QoS) resource pool, wherein the QoS resource pool comprises a predetermined portion of available bandwidth between a first reservation protocol proxy and a second reservation protocol proxy, wherein the first reservation protocol proxy represents a first network device coupled in communication with a packet network and associated with a first user community, wherein the second reservation protocol proxy represents a second network device coupled in communication with the packet network and associated with a second user community for real-time communication sessions among users of the first user community and the second user community; and providing end-to-end application QoS between the first user community and the second user community by selectively admitting a plurality of real-time communication sessions between the first user community and the second user community based upon currently available resources associated with the QoS resource pool and multiplexing the plurality of real-time communication sessions over a common reservation protocol session between the first reservation protocol proxy and the second reservation protocol proxy; wherein said reserving a predetermined portion of available bandwidth between the first reservation protocol proxy and the second reservation protocol proxy includes pre-allocating the reservation protocol session over a path through the packet network between the first network device and the second network device; and wherein the reservation protocol session comprises a Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) session, wherein the first network device and the second network device are part of a geographically distributed voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network, and wherein the packet network comprises the VoIP network.