Driven by the requirements of the emerging applications and networks, the Internet has become an architectural patchwork of growing complexity which strains to cope with the changes. Moore's law prevented us from recognising that the problem does not hide in the high demands of today's applications but lies in the flaws of the Internet's original design. The Internet needs to move beyond TCP/IP to prosper in the long term, TCP/IP has outlived its usefulness.

Over the last two decades, research funding bodies have supported “Future Internet”, “New-IP”, and “Next Generation” design initiatives intended to reduce network complexity by redesigning the network protocol architecture, questioning some of its key principles [...]

Interoperability is one of the biggest challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT). While the emergence of many IoT protocols promises Internet connectivity to a large number of devices, it also leads to an inevitable fragmentation that hinders the IoT adoption. The existing literature focuses on creating device abstractions to deal with the multiplicity of protocols, but little work has been done to eliminate the root cause of fragmentation- the number of protocols itself. This paper proposes a novel approach to simplify IoT by design based on the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) and explores RINA's benefits such as reducing protocol complexity, improving standardization, and enhancing security.

European funded research into the Recursive Inter-Network Architecture (RINA) started with IRATI, which developed an initial prototype implementation for OS/Linux. IRATI was quickly succeeded by the PRISTINE project, which developed different policies, each tailored to specific use cases. Both projects were development-driven, where most experimentation was limited to unit testing and smaller scale integration testing. In order to assess the viability of RINA as an alternative to current network technologies, larger scale experimental deployments are needed. The opportunity arose for a project that shifted focus from development towards experimentation, leveraging Europe’s investment in Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE+) infrastructures. The ARCFIRE project took this next step, developing a user-friendly framework for automating RINA experiments. This paper reports and discusses the implications of the experimental results achieved by the ARCFIRE project, using open source RINA implementations deployed on FIRE+ Testbeds. Experiments analyze the properties of RINA relevant to fast network recovery, network renumbering, Quality of Service, distributed mobility management, and network management. Results highlight RINA properties that can greatly simplify the deployment and management of real-world networks; hence, the next steps should be focused on addressing very specific use cases with complete network RINA-based networking solutions that can be transferred to the market.

This paper reports the results of applying the fundamental networking principles embodied in the Recursive InterNet Architecture (RINA) to unifying VLANs and WiFi. There are two purposes to this: 1) to explore what these principles tell us about VLANs and WiFi that we might not have been previously aware and to explore whether they indicate any improvements or simplifications, and 2) to test the universality of the principles underlying RINA. This work was prompted by the striking similarity of WiFi and VLAN-both are multiple layers of the same rank on a common media. Applying the IPC Model and its instantiation in RINA, we first construct minimal layers tailored to each media and then tailor a universal layer for the resulting environment unifying the two. This has two purposes: 1) to simplify and improve WiFi and VLAN technology, without many of the issues and complexity currently plaguing both 802.11 and 802.1; and 2) to test the limits of the IPC Model and RINA.

"Pearls in Paradise: The Catalog of the Exhibition of Precious Maps and Archives from the Vatican Apostolic Library at Macau University of Science and Technology: Global Mapping of Macao, 2015 Yearbook, Edited by Dai Long Ji and Yang Xun Ling." Imago Mundi, 71(1), pp. 104–105

Mobility management is a challenging problem in current networks, typically requiring dedicated, specialised protocols that manage the lifetime of a series of tunnels that follow mobile hosts as they roam through the network. The fundamental issue that complicates the mobility management problem is the lack of a complete naming and addressing schema in the current Internet architecture. This paper analyses what properties such schema needs to have, and discusses how Internet mobility solutions are missing parts of it. Then it looks at RINA, a network architecture with a complete naming scheme. Theoretical analysis backed up by experimental validation of the main properties for mobility support shows that managing mobility in RINA networks not only is simpler and easier to scale compared to the Internet situation, but also that no special protocols or mechanisms need to be added to RINA in order to support mobility.

Network renumbering in the IP world is a complicated and expensive procedure that has to be carefully planned and executed to avoid routing, security (firewall, ACLs) and transport connection integrity problems. The source of most of these issues is in the lack of a complete naming and addressing architecture in the TCP/IP protocol suite. This paper analyses the issues related to IP networks renumbering, identifying its root causes. Then it looks into how these issues affect renumbering in networks based on RINA, a network architecture with a complete naming scheme. Theoretical analysis backed up by experimentation results indicate that renumbering in RINA networks not only is seamless (can be done without impacting existing flows) but also does not require any special mechanisms.

"China at the Center: Ricci and Verbiest World Maps. Edited by Natasha Reichle." Imago Mundi, 69(1), pp. 127–128

Current Internet security is complex, expensive and ineffective. The usual argument is that the TCP/IP protocol suite was not designed having security in mind and security mechanisms have been added as add-ons or separate protocols. We argue that fundamental limitations in the Internet architecture are a major factor contributing to the insecurity of the Net. In this paper we explore the security properties of the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture, analyzing the principles that make RINA networks inherently more secure than TCP/IP-based ones. We perform the specification, implementation and experimental evaluation of the first authentication and SDU protection policies for RINA networks. RINA's approach to securing layers instead of protocols increases the security of networks, while reducing the complexity and cost of providing security.

Virtualization is an enabling technology that improves scalability, reliability, and flexibility. Virtualized networking is tackled by emulating or paravirtualizing network interface cards. This approach, however, leads to complexities (implementation and management) and has to conform to some limitations imposed by the Ethernet standard. RINA turns the current approach to virtualized networking on its head: instead of emulating networks to perform inter-process communication on a single processing system, it sees networking as an extension to local inter-process communication. In this article, we show how RINA can leverage a paravirtualization approach to achieve a more manageable solution for virtualized networking. We also present experimental results performed on IRATI, the reference open source implementation of RINA, which shows the potential performance that can be achieved by deploying our solution.

In a 2011 Anecdote department article in the Annals, Alex McKenzie provided an excellent account of the events between 1974 and 1976 leading up to INWG 96, a proposed internetwork transport protocol. McKenzie's anecdote focused on the events in INWG (International Network Working Group), which this article shows were a small part of a much larger debate that was going on outside. The author places the INWG discussions in this wider context to better understand the technical points and implications, their ultimate impact, and the paradigm shift that threatened established business models.

Software Defined Networks (SDN) has taken the world by storm. Only a few years old as technology, most of the big players have SDN in their product portfolio or in their strategic roadmap. SDN has changed the way we virtualize the network fabric in data centers, provided new features for cloud computing, and arguably plays a big role in facilitating Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Looking ahead, SDN has the potential to make the network disappear altogether, similar to Mark Weiser’s vision for computing. However, while SDN’s main contribution is a new south-bound interface for TCP/IP flow control, little work has been done on the north-bound interface for the interaction with and the management of an SDN network. Two essential items are still missing. First, SDN does currently not provide means to expose network capabilities to applications (e.g. a QoS cube), thus it fails to bridge the gap between the network and services. Second, SDN does not help to advance network management while introducing many new challenges for it. In this paper, we start discussing the disappearing network and discuss how to address the two missing items in the progress. Our contribution is to examin the Recursive InterNetworking Architecture (RINA) as an evolutionary step for SDN, which we present that in the form of three use cases.

At first, the title of this book may seem contradictory. Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville was not a Jesuit and never left France. Resolving that is only part of what makes this book intriguing. ...

ProtoRINA is a user-space prototype of the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture. RINA is a new architecture that builds on the fundamental principle that "networking is inter-process communication". As a consequence, RINA overcomes inherent weaknesses of the current Internet, e.g., security, mobility support, and manageability. ProtoRINA serves not only as a prototype that demonstrates the advantages of RINA, but also as a network experimental tool that enables users to program different policies using its built-in mechanisms. In this note, we introduce ProtoRINA as a vehicle for making RINA concepts concrete and for encouraging researchers to use and benefit from the prototype.

ProtoRINA is a user-space prototype of the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture. RINA is a new architecture that builds on the fundamental principle that "networking is inter-process communication". As a consequence, RINA overcomes inherent weaknesses of the current Internet, e.g., security, mobility support, and manageability. ProtoRINA serves not only as a prototype that demonstrates the advantages of RINA, but also as a network experimental tool that enables users to program different policies using its built-in mechanisms. In this note, we introduce ProtoRINA as a vehicle for making RINA concepts concrete and for encouraging researchers to use and benefit from the prototype.

There is often a requirement to interface a new model to a legacy implementation by creating a shim between them to make the legacy appear as close to the new model as possible. This is a common exercise, usually fraught with frustrations, but here we find the exercise reveals fundamental aspects about nature of layers that were previously not well understood. Here we will be primarily concerned with creating a shim between RINA and IEEE 802.1q (VLANs). The Recursive InterNet Architecture (RINA) proposes a network architecture derived from the fundamentals of InterProcess Communication (IPC). This yields a recursively layered architecture of Distributed IPC Facilities (DIFs).

The TCP/IP architecture was originally designed without taking security measures into consideration. Over the years, it has been subjected to many attacks, which has led to many patches to counter them. Our investigations into the fundamental principles of networking have shown that carefully following an abstract model of Inter-Process Communication (IPC) addresses many problems [1]. Guided by this IPC principle, we designed a clean-slate Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) [2]. In this paper, we show how, without the aid of cryptographic techniques, the bare-bones architecture of RINA can resist most of the security attacks faced by TCP/IP, and of course, is only more secure if cryptographic techniques are employed. Specifically, the RINA model decouples different concerns that makes it more resistant to transport-level attacks: (1) RINA decouples authentication from connection management, thus transport-level attacks are limited to “insider” attacks, and (2) RINA decouples transport port allocation and access control from data synchronization and transfer, thus making transport-level attacks much harder to mount. Using typical field lengths in packet headers, we analyze how hard it is for an intruder to compromise RINA.