Maintenance of sliding window aggregated state using combination of soft state and explicit release principles

A method is provided for reserving, maintaining and releasing resources in the interior nodes located within an interior network positioned between edge nodes, wherein requests belonging to corresponding data microflows that continually arrive at any interior node do not establish any microflow reservation states, but these requests can establish, maintain and release either a part of, or an entire aggregated reservation state, using a combination of reservation soft state and explicit release principles. A window is applied to establish a first time period, which includes a selected cell in a sequence of time cells and also includes a number of additional cells preceding the selected cell. Arrival of reserve and refresh requests during the selected cell is detected to generate an rfcount associated with the selected cell.; The rfcount is combined with a lastsum associated with the preceding cells to form a newsum, which is used to manage resources in the interior network during a reservation period corresponding to the selected cell. Following the selected cell, the window is shifted to establish a second time period which includes the next cell in the sequence, and excludes the oldest cell of the first time period.