Although efforts on reservation protocols for internetworks started quite some time ago, the research community is now becoming particularly active in this area, as proved by the high interest generated by protocols such as ST-II and RSVP. These two protocols, starting from different assumptions, have the common goal of providing guaranteed communication by reserving network bandwidth. This paper provides a short comparison of the two protocols. It describes and compares their mechanisms, focusing on the data forwarding, multicast, and quality of service aspects for multimedia communication. Rather than trying to decide which protocol is superior, we have identified the classes of applications which are better supported by one or the other protocol.