Recursive Internetwork Architecture
The principles behind RINA were first presented by John Day in his 2008 book Patterns in Network Architecture: A return to Fundamentals.
These DAPs communicate using the Common Distributed Application Protocol or CDAP, exchanging structured data in the form of objects.
These objects are structured in a Resource Information Base or RIB, which provides a naming schema and a logical organization to them.
CDAP provides six basic operations on a remote DAP's objects: create, delete, read, write, start and stop.
RINA is therefore an attempt to reuse as much theory as possible and eliminate the need for ad-hoc protocol design, and thus reduce the complexity of network construction, management and operation in the process.
[citation needed] As explained above, the IP address is too low-level an identifier on which to base multihoming and mobility efficiently, as well as requiring routing tables to be bigger than necessary.
Saltzer took his model from operating systems, but the RINA authors concluded it could not be applied cleanly to internetworks, which can have more than one path between the same pair of nodes (let alone whole networks).
DIFs also do not expose their IPCP addresses to higher layers, preventing a wide class of man-in-the-middle attacks.
[9] The starting point for a radically new and different network architecture like RINA is an attempt to solve or a response to the following problems which do not appear to have practical or compromise-free solutions with current network architectures, especially the Internet protocol suite and its functional layering as depicted in Figure 6: Though these problems are far more acutely visible today, there have been precedents and cases almost right from the beginning of the ARPANET, the environment in which the Internet protocol suite was designed: In 1972, Tinker Air Force Base[15] wanted connections to two different IMPs for redundancy.
Richard Watson in 1981 provided a fundamental theory of reliable transport[17] whereby connection management requires only timers bounded by a small factor of the Maximum Packet Lifetime (MPL).
Based on this theory, Watson et al. developed the Delta-t protocol [7] which allows a connection's state to be determined simply by bounding three timers, with no handshaking.
[19] This explains the need for autonomous systems and NAT today, to partition and reuse ranges of the IP address space to facilitate administration.
In 1988 IAB recommended using SNMP as the initial network management protocol for the Internet to later transition to the object-oriented approach of CMIP.
[22] SNMP was a step backwards in network management, justified as a temporary measure while the required more sophisticated approaches were implemented, but the transition never happened.
In 1992 the IAB produced a series of recommendations to resolve the scaling problems of the IPv4-based Internet: address space consumption and routing information explosion.
Three options were proposed: introduce CIDR to mitigate the problem; design the next version of IP (IPv7) based on CLNP; or continue the research into naming, addressing and routing.
[23] CLNP was an OSI-based protocol that addressed nodes instead of interfaces, solving the old multihoming problem dating back to the ARPANET, and allowing for better routing information aggregation.
One of the rules for IPng was not to change the semantics of the IP address, which continues to name the interface, perpetuating the multihoming problem.
The RINA research team at Boston University is led by Professors Abraham Matta, John Day and Lou Chitkushev, and has been awarded a number of grants from the National Science Foundation and EC in order to continue investigating the fundamentals of RINA, develop an open source prototype implementation over UDP/IP for Java [25][26] and experiment with it on top of the GENI infrastructure.
Its main goal is to explore the programmability aspects of RINA to implement innovative policies for congestion control, resource allocation, routing, security and network management.
[citation needed] IRINA was funded by the GÉANT3+ open call, and is a project with four partners: iMinds, WIT-TSSG, i2CAT and Nextworks.
