Intellectual Merit: The Internet has expanded well beyond its original design, and over the years, ad hoc patches have rendered it much more difficult to manage and to make secure. This project developed a Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA), a new architecture that builds on the fundamental principle that networking is Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and only IPC. As a consequence, RINA views the network as a collection of networks of communicating processes, rather than a network of “boxes.” A “layer”, or building block, in RINA is called a Distributed IPC Facility (DIF). A DIF constitutes a (virtual) network of communicating processes, which can recursively provide communication service to a higher layer (see figure). RINA separates mechanisms and policies, so all processes use the same mechanisms (i.e., “how” to communicate), but they may use different policies (i.e., “what” to do) in different layers over different scopes. RINA has a complete naming/addressing architecture where processes, not interfaces (connections), are named, so processes can freely move or migrate. And addresses are not static but relative to the layer in which the process resides, so a global address space is not needed. Each process employs only two policy-configurable protocols: a data transfer control protocol and an object-based management protocol. Given it is built on such fundamental foundations, RINA subsumes existing Future Internet Architecture (FIA) proposals and inherently supports security and manageability.

Broader Impacts: This project developed ProtoRINA, a user-space prototype of RINA. ProtoRINA provides a framework with common mechanisms, so researchers do not have to implement these from scratch; rather they can focus on programming different policies (supported by user applications or network management applications). These (software-defined) policies include: routing traffic through virtualized network functions (e.g., a firewall running remotely in a data center), streaming video over low-jitter communication paths, controlling the level of traffic aggregation and service over different parts of the Internet, and explicitly authenticating users and controlling access to services. ProtoRINA offers several features: (i) it is not restricted to the Internet Protocol (IP), so it enables experimentation with new control and management applications; (ii) it can be used as a teaching tool by educators in networking and distributed systems classes; and (iii) it can be used to run real experiments, both on local-area networks and on wide-area network testbeds such as the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). ProtoRINA (version 1.0) has been released since October 2013 and used to demonstrate the RINA architecture and its advantages, and also to experiment with different policies. A tutorial on running ProtoRINA on GENI was delivered at the GENI Engineering Conference (GEC19), and is available online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUDvduy-JEs). The ProtoRINA code, along with its user / programmer’s manual and other documentation, are available from a wiki page (http://csr.bu.edu/rina/protorina). The theory behind RINA can guide the design and management of not only computer networks, but also distributed systems and applications, including data centers and cloud computing systems.

Last Modified: 07/07/2015
Modified by: Abraham I Matta