Recursive Internetwork Architecture: Difference between revisions

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The '''Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA)''' is a computer [[network architecture]] that unifies [[distributed computing]] and [[telecommunications]]. RINA's fundamental principle is that [[computer network]]ing is just [[Inter-Process Communication]] or IPC. RINA reconstructs the overall structure of the [[Internet]], forming a model that comprises a single repeating layer, the DIF (Distributed IPC Facility), which is the minimal set of components required to allow distributed IPC between application processes. RINA inherently supports mobility, [[multihoming|multi-homing]] and [[Quality of Service]] without the need for extra mechanisms, provides a secure and programmable environment, motivates for a more competitive marketplace, and allows for a seamless adoption.

==History and Motivation==

The principles behind RINA were first presented by [[John_Day_John Day (computer_scientistcomputer scientist)|John Day]] in his book “Patterns in Network Architecture: A return to Fundamentals”...<ref name="PNA">Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals, John Day (2008), Prentice Hall, ISBN-13: 978-0132252423</ref>. This work is a start afresh, taking into account lessons learned in the 35 years of [[TCP/IP]]’s existence, as well as the lessons of [[OSI]]’s failure and the lessons of other network technologies of the past few decades, such as [[CYCLADES]], [[DECnet]], and [[Xerox Network Systems]].

From the early days of telephony to the present, the [[telecommunications]] and computing industries have evolved significantly. However, they have been following separate paths, without achieving full integration that can optimally support [[distributed computing]]; the paradigm shift from [[telephony]] to distributed applications is still not complete. Telecoms have been focusing on connecting devices, perpetuating the telephony model where devices and applications are the same. A look at the current [[Internet protocol suite]] shows many symptoms of this thinking :<ref name="INWG">A. McKenzie, “INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account”; IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 66-71, 2011</ref>:

* The network routes data between interfaces of computers, as the public switched telephone network switched calls between phone terminals. However, it is not the source and destination ''interfaces'' that wish to communicate, but the distributed ''applications''.

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Several attempts have been made to propose architectures that overcome the current Internet limitations, under the umbrella of the [[Future Internet]] research efforts. However, most proposals argue that requirements have changed, and therefore the [[Internet]] is no longer capable to cope with them. While it is true that the environment in which the technologies that support the [[Internet]] today live is very different from when they where conceived in the late 1970s, changing requirements are not the only reason behind the Internet's problems related to multihoming, mobility, security or QoS to name a few. The root of the problems may be attributed to the fact the current [[Internet]] is based on a tradition focused on keeping the original [[ARPANET]] demo working and fundamentally unchanged, as illustrated by the following paragraphs.

'''1972. Multi-homing not supported by the ARPANET'''. In 1972 the [[Tinker Air Force Base]] wanted connections to two different IMPs ([[Interface Message Processors]], the predecessors of today's routers) for redundancy. [[ARPANET]] designers realized that they couldn't support this feature because host addresses were the addresses of the IMP port number the host was connected to (borrowing from telephony). To the [[ARPANET]], two interfaces of the same host had different addresses, therefore it had no way of knowing that they belong to the same host. The solution was obvious: as in operating systems, a logical address space naming the nodes (hosts and routers) was required on top of the physical interface address space. However, the implementation of this solution was left for future work, and it is still not done today: “''IP addresses of all types are assigned to interfaces, not to nodes''” .<ref name="IPv6">R. Hinden and S. Deering. IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture. RFC 4291 (Draft Standard), February 2006. Updated by RFCs 5952, 6052</ref>. As a consequence, routing table sizes are orders of magnitude bigger than they would need to be, and multi-homing and mobility are complex to achieve, requiring both special protocols and point solutions.

'''1978. [[Transmission Control Protocol]] (TCP) split from the [[Internet Protocol]] (IP).''' Initial TCP versions performed the error and flow control (current TCP) and relaying and multiplexing (IP) functions in the same protocol. In 1978 TCP was split from IP, although the two layers had the same scope. This would not be a problem if: i) the two layers were independent and ii) the two layers didn't contain repeated functions. However none of both is right: in order to operate effectively IP needs to know what TCP is doing. IP fragmentation and the workaround of MTU discovery that TCP does in order to avoid it to happen is a clear example of this issue. In fact, as early as in 1987 the networking community was well aware of the IP fragmentation problems, to the point of considering it harmful .<ref>C.A. Kent and J.C. Mogul. Fragmentation considered harmful. Proceedings of Frontiers in Computer Communications Technologies, ACM SIGCOMM, 1987</ref>. However, it was not understood as a symptom that TCP and IP were interdependent and therefore splitting it into two layers of the same scope was not a good decision.

'''1981. Watson's fundamental results ignored'''. Richard Watson in 1981 provided a fundamental theory of reliable transport ,<ref>R. Watson. Timer-based mechanism in reliable transport protocol connection management. Computer Networks, 5:47–56, 1981</ref>, 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 <ref name="deltat">R. Watson. Delta-t protocol specification. Technical Report UCID-19293, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, December 1981</ref> in which the state of a connection at the sender and receiver can be safely removed once the connection-state timers expire without the need for explicit removal messages. And new connections are established without an explicit handshaking phase. On the other hand, TCP uses both explicit handshaking as well as more limited timer-based management of the connection’s state. Had TCP incorporated Watson's results it would be more efficient, robust and secure, eliminating the use of SYNs and FINs and therefore all the associated complexities and vulnerabilities to attack (such as [[SYN flood]]).

'''1983. Internetwork layer lost, the Internet ceases to be an Internet'''. Early in 1972 the International Network Working Group (INWG) was created to bring together the nascent network research community. One of the early tasks it accomplished was voting an international network transport protocol, which was approved in 1976 .<ref name="INWG"/>. A remarkable aspect is that the selected option, as well as all the other candidates, had an architecture composed of 3 layers of increasing scope: data link (to handle different types of physical medias), network (to handle different types of networks) and internetwork (to handle a network of networks), each layer with its own addresses. In fact when TCP/IP was introduced it run at the internetwork layer on top of the [[Network Control Program]] and other network technologies. But when NCP was shut down, TCP/IP took the network role and the internetwork layer was lost .<ref name="lostlayer">J. Day. How in the Heck Do You Lose a Layer!? 2nd IFIP International Conference of the Network of the Future, Paris, France, 2011</ref>. As a result, the Internet ceased to be an Internet and became a concatenation of IP networks with an end-to-end transport layer on top. A consequence of this decision is the complex routing system required today, with both intra-___domain and inter-___domain routing happening at the network layer <ref name="EGP">E.C. Rosen. Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP). RFC 827, October 1982. Updated by RFC 904.</ref> or the use of NAT, [[Network Address Translation]], as a mechanism for allowing independent address spaces within a single network layer.

[[File:INWG-arch.png|thumb|350px|Figure1. The Internet architecture as seen by the INWG]]

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'''1983. First opportunity to fix addressing missed'''. The need for application names and distributed directories that mapped application names to internetwork addresses was well understood since mid 1970s. They were not there at the beginning since it was a major effort and there were very few applications, but they were expected to be introduced once the “host file” was automated (the host file was centrally maintained and mapped human-readable synonyms of addresses to its numeric value). However, application names were not introduced and DNS, the [[Domain Name System]], was designed and deployed, continuing to use well-known ports to identify applications. The advent of the web and [[HTTP]] caused the need for application names, introducing [[URLs]]. However the URL format ties each application instance to a physical interface of a computer and a specific transport connection (since the URL contains the DNS name of an IP interface and TCP port number), making multi-homing and mobility very hard to achieve.

'''1986. [[Congestion collapse]] takes the Internet by surprise'''. Despite the fact that the problem of congestion control in datagram networks had been known since the very beginning (in fact there had been several publications during the 70s and early 80s ,<ref>D. Davies. Methods, tools and observations on flow control in packet-switched data networks. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 20(3): 546–550, 1972</ref>, <ref>S. S. Lam and Y.C. Luke Lien. Congestion control of packet communication networks by input buffer limits - a simulation study. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 30(10), 1981.</ref>) the congestion collapse in 1986 caught the Internet by surprise. What is worse, it was decided to adopt the [[congestion avoidance]] scheme from [[Ethernet]] networks with a few modifications, but it was put in TCP. The effectiveness of a congestion control scheme is determined by the time-to-notify, i.e. reaction time. Putting congestion avoidance in TCP maximizes the value of the congestion notification delay and its variance, making it the worst place it could be. Moreover, congestion detection is implicit, causing several problems: i) congestion avoidance mechanisms are predatory: by definition they need to cause congestion to act; ii) congestion avoidance mechanisms may be triggered when the network is not congested, causing a downgrade in performance.

'''1992. Second opportunity to fix addressing missed'''. In 1992 the [[Internet Architecture Board]] (IAB) produced a series of recommendations to resolve the scaling problems of the [[IPv4]] based Internet: address space consumption and routing information explosion. Three types of solutions were proposed: introduce CIDR ([[Classless Inter-Domain Routing]]) to mitigate the problem, design the next version of IP (IPv7) based on [[CLNP]] (ConectionLess Network Protocol) and continue the research into naming, addressing and routing .<ref>Internet Architecture Board. IP Version 7 ** DRAFT 8 **. Draft IAB IPversion7, july 1992</ref>. CNLP was an OSI based protocol that addressed nodes instead of interfaces, solving the old multi-homing problem introduced by the [[ARPANET]], and allowing for better routing information aggregation. CIDR was introduced but the [[IETF]] didn't accept an IPv7 based on CLNP. IAB reconsidered its decision and the IPng process started, culminating with [[IPv6]]. One of the rules for IPng was not to change the semantics of the IP address, which continues to name the interface perpetuating the multi-homing problem .<ref name="IPv6"/>.

There are still more wrong decisions that have resulted in long-term problems for the current Internet, such as:

* In 1988 IAB recommended using the [[Simple Network Management Protocol]] (SNMP) as the initial network management protocol for the Internet to later transition to the object-oriented approach of the [[Common Management Information Protocol]] (CMIP) .<ref>Internet Architecture Board. IAB Recommendations for the Development of Internet Network Management Standards. RFC 1052, april 1988</ref>. SNMP was a step backwards in network management, justified as a temporal measure while the required more sophisticated approaches were implemented, but the transition never happened.

* Since [[IPv6]] didn’t solve the multi-homing problem and naming the node was not accepted, the major theory pursued by the field is that the IP address semantics are overloaded with both identity and ___location information, and therefore the solution is to separate the two, leading to the work on [[Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol]] (LISP). However all approaches based on LISP have scaling problems <ref name="lispis">D. Meyer and D. Lewis. Architectural implications of Locator/ID separation. Draft Meyer Loc Id implications, january 2009</ref> because i) it is based on a false distinction (identity vs. ___location) and ii) it is not routing packets to the end destination (LISP is using the locator for routing, which is an interface address; therefore the multi-homing problem is still there) .<ref name="lispno">J. Day. Why loc/id split isn’t the answer, 2008. Available online at http://rina.tssg.org/docs/LocIDSplit090309.pdf</ref>.

* The recent discovery of [[bufferbloat]] due to the use of large buffers in the network. Since the beginning of the 80s it was already known that the buffer size should be the minimal to damp out transient traffic bursts ,<ref>L. Pouzin. Methods, tools and observations on flow control in packet-switched data networks. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 29(4): 413–426, 1981</ref>, but no more since buffers increase the transit delay of packets within the network.

* The inability to provide efficient solutions to security problems such as authentication, access control, integrity and confidentiality, since they were not part of the initial design. As stated in <ref>D. Clark, L. Chapin, V. Cerf, R. Braden and R. Hobby. Towards the Future Internet Architecture. RFC 1287 (Informational), December 1991</ref> “''experience has shown that it is difficult to add security to a protocol suite unless it is built into the architecture from the beginning''”.

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* Stacking DIFs on top of each other allows networks to be built from smaller and more manageable layers of limited scope. This divide-and-conquer strategy gives providers more resource management options than just over-provisioning. It also provides the basis for operating subnetworks at much higher utilization than in the current Internet.

* RINA leverages the well-known concept of separating mechanism from policy in operating systems .<ref name="policy">P. Brinch Hansen. The nucleous of a multiprogramming system. Communications of the ACM, 13(4): 238-241, 1970</ref>. Applying this separation to network protocols allows a DIF to provide a common minimal set of mechanisms that once instantiated with the appropriate policies allows any transport solution to be realised .<ref>I. Matta, J. Day, V. Ishakian, K. Mattar and G. Gursun. Declarative transport: No more transport protocols to design, only policies to specify. Technical Report BUCS-TR-2008-014, CS Dept, Boston. U., July 2008</ref>. Not only the transport functions of a DIF benefit from this approach, but also other ones such as management, authentication or access control; making the DIF a fully-configurable container capable of effectively operating on top of heterogeneous physical medias and to provide differentiated levels of QoS to different types of applications.

* DIFs can be configured to not only provide the fundamental services of the traditional networking lower layers but also the services of application relaying (e.g. mail distribution and similar services), [[transaction processing]], [[content distribution]] and [[peer-to-peer]]. This removes the barrier created by the Transport Layer in the current Internet, opening potential new markets for ISPs to provide IPC services directly to their customers leveraging their expertise in resource management of lower layers.

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==RINA compared to [[TCP/IP]]==

===Structure===

While in [[operating systems]] layers are a convenience - a way to achieve modularity - in networks layers are a necessity, since in networks there is distributed shared state of different scopes. Layers are the tool for isolating distributed shared state of different scopes, nothing else is required. The current Internet architecture uses a layered architecture with a fixed number of layers, every layer having the responsibility of a different function, as depicted in Figure 4 (functional layering).

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[[File:TCPIP-arch.png|thumb|350px|Figure 4. Functional layering of the TCP/IP architecture]]

The current architecture just provides two scopes: data link (scope of layers 1 and 2), and global (scope of layers 3 and 4). However, layer 4 is just implemented in the hosts, therefore the “network side” of the Internet ends at layer 3. This means that the current Internet is able to handle a network with heterogeneous physical links, but it is not designed to handle heterogeneous networks, although this is supposed to be its operation. To be able to do it, it would require an “Internetwork” scope, which is now missing .<ref name="lostlayer"/>. As ironic as it may sound, the current Internet is not really an internetwork, but a concatenation of IP networks with an end-to-end transport layer on top of them. The consequences of this flaw are several: both inter-___domain and intra-___domain routing have to happen within the network layer, and its scope had to be artificially isolated through the introduction of the concept of [[Autonomous Systems]] and an [[Exterior Gateway Protocol]] ;<ref name="EGP"/>; [[Network Address Translation]] (NATs) appeared as middleboxes in order to have a means of partitioning and reusing parts of the single IP address space .<ref>K. Egevang and P. Francis. The IP Network Address Translator (NAT). RFC 1631 (Informational), May 1994. Obsoleted by RFC 3022</ref>.

With an internetwork layer none of this would be necessary: inter-___domain routing would happen at the internetwork layer, while intra-___domain routing within each network would occur at each respective network layer. NATs would not be required since each network could have its own internal address space; only the addresses in the internetwork layer would have to be common. Moreover, congestion could be confined to individual networks, instead of having to deal with it at a global scope as it is done today. The internetwork layer was there in previous internetwork architectures, for example, the INWG architecture depicted in Figure 3, which was designed in 1976. It was somehow lost when the [[Network Control Program]] was phased out ant the Internet officially started in 1983.

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With this naming structure, support for mobility and multi-homing is inherent, if the properties for the names are chosen with care: application names are ___location-independent to allow an application to move around, node addresses are ___location-dependent but route-independent. PoA addresses are by nature route-dependent. Applying this naming scheme to RINA, with recursive layers, an interesting observation can be made: mapping application names to node addresses is the same mapping than mapping node addresses to PoAs. In other words, for any layer N, nodes at the layer N+1 are applications and nodes at the layer N-1 are points of attachment, making this relationship relative.

The [[Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol]] (LISP or Loc/ID split) <ref name="lisp">D. Farinacci, V. Fuller, D. Meyer, and D. Lewis. Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP). Draft IETF LISP 18, december 2011</ref> has been proposed by [[IETF]] as a solution to issues as the scalability of the routing system. LISP main argument is that the semantics of the IP address are overloaded being to be both locator and identifier of an endpoint. LISP proposes to address this issue by separating the IP address into a locator part, which is hierarchical, and an identifier, which is flat. However this is a false distinction: in Computer Science it is impossible to locate something without identifying it and to identify something without locating it, since all the names are using for locating an object within a context .<ref name="Saltzer"/>. Moreover, LISP continues to use the locator for routing, therefore routes are computed between locators (inter- faces). However, a path does not end on a locator but on an identifier, in other words, the locator is not the ultimate destination of the packet but a point on the path to the ultimate destination .<ref name="lispno"/>. This issue leads to path-discovery problems, as documented by <ref name="lispis"/> whose solution is known not to scale.

RINA adopts and extends Saltzer’s model by supporting internetworks, and making it recursive. It has a complete naming and addressing schema, providing names for the basic entities of the network (nodes, PoAs and applications). As a consequence RINA supports mobility and multi-homing inherently <ref>V. Ishakian, J. Akinwuni, F. Esposito, I. Matta, "On supporting mobility and multihoming in recursive internet architectures". Computer Communications, Volume 35, Issue 13, July 2012, pages 1561-1573</ref>

===Protocol Design===

A protocol can effectively serve different applications with a wide range of requirements as long as this is the goal from the beginning of the protocol design. In RINA, policy and mechanism are separated, resulting in a framework than can be fine-tuned through policy specification. The mechanism of a protocol may be tightly bound, such as the headers of a data transfer packet, or loosely bound, as in some control and acknowledgment messages. The use of common mechanisms in conjunction with different policies, rather than the use of separate protocols brings greater flexibility .<ref name="policy"/>. Each DIF can use different policies to provide different classes of quality of service to further adapt to the characteristics of the physical media (if the DIF is close to the lower end of the stack) or to the characteristics of the applications (if the DIF is close to the upper end of the stack).

By separating mechanism and policy, RINA dramatically simplifies networking. There is no longer a different set of modules and protocols for each capability in each layer. Instead, the elements of the DIF combine to accomplish functions that have previously required a multitude of individual specifications. The implications of this are significant: rather than hundreds of handcrafted protocols each with their own optimizations, there is a consistent repeating structure of two protocols (an application protocol, a data transfer protocol) and a common header and roughly a half dozen modules. In this approach there is thus far less to go wrong. A single replicable layer of a half dozen or so modules can be much more effectively engineered to be free of bugs and security holes than the literally hundreds of protocols in conventional Internetworking. Furthermore, the inherently constrained nature of policies makes it possible to circumscribe their side effects and ensure their proper behaviour. It is possible to define properties of policies that can be proved or tested that ensure proper behaviour.

The basis of the data transfer control protocol in RINA is the Delta-T protocol .<ref name="deltat"/>. Watson proved that the necessary and sufficient conditions for reliable transfer is to bound three timers. Delta-T is an example of how this should work. It does not require a connection setup (such as TCP’s SYN handshake) or tear-down (like TCP’s FIN handshake) for integrity purposes. In fact, TCP uses the same three timers! So RINA avoids unnecessary overhead. Watson showed that synchronization and port allocation are distinct functions. Port allocation is part of DIF management, while synchronization is part of the data transfer protocol. In fact, maintaining the distinction also improves the security of connection setup, and avoids the need for separate protocols like [[IPSec]], since multiple transport connections can be associated to the same port allocation.

By separating mechanism from policy, RINA dramatically reduces the number of protocols required in the architecture, while still allowing each layer to be customized to provide different levels of quality of service. Applying Watson’s theory of separating port allocation from synchronisation enables simpler, more robust and more reliable data transfer protocols.

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[[File:RINA-sec.png|thumb|350px|Figure 6. Placement of security functions in the RINA architecture.]]

'''Resiliency to data transport attacks'''. IPCP (node) addresses are internal to a DIF and not exposed to applications, data connections are dynamically assigned connection-endpoint ids (CEP-ids) that are bound to dynamically assigned ports. Bodappati et al. <ref>G. Boddapati, J. Day, I. Matta, L. Chitkushev, "Assessing the security of a clean-slate Internet architecture," Network Protocols (ICNP), 2012 20th IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1,6, Oct. 30 2012-Nov. 2 2012</ref> showed that due to this decoupling of transport port allocation and access control from data synchronization and transfer RINA was much more resilient than TCP/IP to transport-level attacks such as port-scanning, connection opening or data-transfer.

'''DIFs are securable containers, no firewalls are necessary'''. Small et al. <ref>J. Small, J. Day, L. Chitkushev, “Threat analysis of Recursive Inter-Network Architecture Distributed Inter-Process Communication Facilities”. Boston University Technical Note. </ref> performed a threat analysis at the RINA architecture level, concluding that DIFs are securable containers. That is, if proper authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity protection and auditing policies are put in place (as identified in section 2.1) a DIF is a structure used to transport data that can be made to be not subject to thread. No external tools such as firewalls are required.

'''Complexity of RINA security is lower than that of the current Internet security'''. This is a consequence of the different approach to each of the architectures: the system design approach adopted by the RINA architecture, is based on identifying the proper placement of all the functions within the architecture - in contrast to the disorganized evolution of the Internet “protocol-suite” which leads to unnecessary redundancy and complexity. This is particularly evident in comparing the number of protocols and mechanisms required to add security to both RINA and the Internet: Small<ref>J. Small. “Patterns in Network Security: An analysis of architectural complexity in securing Recrusive Inter-Network Architecture Networks”. Master thesis, 2012. Boston University Library</ref> showed that the current Internet security had for 4-5 times the overhead of RINA security. Less overhead means not only less cost but also more effective security, since complexity is the worst enemy of security <ref>B. Schneier, “Complexity the worst enemy of Security”. Computer World, December 2012.</ref>

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'''Greater robustness and more effective response to change.''' Response to change is far faster thanks to load balancing, quicker convergence due to much smaller routing table sizes, more responsive flow management, and, on the manpower side, simpler and more effective operational management. RINA provides all of the flexibility and survivability of connectionless networking while supporting all the service capabilities of connection-oriented networking. Data flows under hostile environments are far more reliable due to highly tuneable, situation-specific policies. As new demands arise, systems can be quickly reconfigured to accommodate them simply by configuring new policies.

'''A more competitive marketplace'''. The particular “best-effort” architecture adopted by the Internet does relegate providers to a commodity business. The Transport Layer (TCP) effectively seals the providers off in the lower layers with IP providing a best-effort service. This implies that everyone must do the same thing or nearly so, leaving little room for differentiation and competition and relegates them to a commodity business. RINA creates the robust feedback needed for a healthy marketplace .<ref>J. Day. Creating a viable economic model for a viable internet, 2008. Available online at http://rina.tssg.org/docs/PNAEcon080518.pdf</ref>. An application API allows applications to request service with specific QoS requirements from the layer below. Each DIF can be configured to not only provide the traditional services of lower networking layers but also application-support (transport) services. This removes the barrier created by the Transport Layer in the current Internet, opening potential new markets for ISPs to provide IPC services directly to their customers, leveraging their expertise in resource management of lower layers and creating new competition with “host” providers. This distributed IPC can be configured to not only provide the fundamental services of the traditional networking lower layers but also the services of application relaying, e.g. mail distribution and similar services; transaction processing, and peer-to-peer.

[[File:RINA-Internets.png|thumb|350px|Figure 7. Multiple RINA networks supporting several internetworks.]]

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==Research projects==

From the publishing of the PNA book in 2008 until 2014 a lot of RINA research and development work has been done. There is a clear need for an international authority that coordinates the different ongoing activities, make sure their results are integrated in the basic reference model but at the same time are able to incorporate new knowledge or fix inconsistencies. An informal group known as the Pouzin Society (PSOC) <ref>Pouzin Society website: http://www.pouzinsociety.org</ref>– named after [[Louis Pouzin]] ,<ref>A. L. Russell, V. Schaffer. “In the shadow of ARPAnet and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades network in the 1970s”. Available online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/technology_and_culture/v055/55.4.russell.html</ref>, the inventor of [[datagrams]] and connectionless networking - has been taking this role.

===BU Research Team===

The RINA research team at Boston University <ref>Boston University’s RINA research team website: http://csr.bu.edu/rina</ref> is lead by John Day. BU has been awarded a number of grants from the [[National Science Foundation]] in order to continue investigating the fundamentals of RINA, develop an open source prototype implementation over UDP/IP for Java <ref>ProtoRINA github site: https://github.com/ProtoRINA/users/wiki</ref> and experiment with it on top of the GENI infrastruct .<ref>Yuefeng Wang, Ibrahim Matta and Nabeel Akhtar. "Experimenting with Routing Policies Using ProtoRINA over GENI". The Third GENI Research and Educational Experiment Workshop (GREE2014), March 19-2019–20, 2014, Atlanta, Georgia</ref>. BU is also a member of the Pouzin Society and an active contributor to the FP7 IRATI and PRISTINE projects. In addition to this, BU has incorporated the RINA concepts and theory in their computer networking courses.

===FP7 IRATI===

IRATI <ref>The FP7 IRATI project website: http://irati.eu</ref> is an FP7-funded project with 5 partners: i2CAT, Nextworks, iMinds, Interoute and Boston University, whose main goal is to produce an open source RINA implementation for the Linux OS on top of Ethernet ,.<ref>S. Vrijders, D. Staesses, D. Colle, F. Salvestrini, E. Grasa, M. Tarzan and L. Bergesio “Prototyping the Recursive Internetwork Architecture: The IRATI Project Approach“, IEEE Network, Vol. 28, no. 2, March 2014</ref>, <ref>S. Vrijders, D. Staessens, D. Colle, F. Salvestrini, V. Maffione, L. Bergesio, M. Tarzan, B. Gaston, E. Grasa; “Experimental evaluation of a Recursive InterNetwork Architecture prototype“, IEEE Globecom 2014, Austin, Texas</ref>. FP7 IRATI has already open-sourced the first release of the RINA implementation, called as the project “IRATI” .<ref>Open IRATI github site, available at: http://irati.github.io/stack</ref>. The implementation will be further enhanced by the PRISTINE and IRINA projects.

===FP7 PRISTINE===

PRISTINE <ref>The FP7 PRISTINE project website: http://ict-pristine.eu</ref> is an FP7-funded project with 15 partners: WIT-TSSG, i2CAT, Nextworks, TelefonicaTelefónica I+D, Thales, Nexedi, B-ISDN, Atos, University of Oslo, Juniper Networks, Brno University, IMT-TSP, CREATE-NET, iMinds and UPC; whose main goal is to explore the programmability aspects of RINA to implement innovative policies for congestion control, resource allocation, routing, security and network management.

===GEANT3+ Open Call winner IRINA===

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{{reflist|colwidth=30em}}

==External Linkslinks==

* RINA Education page at the IRATI website, available online at http://irati.eu/education/

* RINA document repository run by the TSSG, available online at http://rina.tssg.org

* RINA tutorial at the IEEE Globecom 2014 conference, available online at http://www.slideshare.net/irati-project/rina-tutorial-ieee-globecom-2014

{{Uncategorized|date=March 2015}}