PRISTINE - PROGRAMMABILITY WITH RINA (RECURSIVE INTERNET ARCHITECTURE)

RINA (Recursive Internet Architecture) unifies distributed computing and networking, since networking is just a distributed application: distributed computing specialized to provide IPC services. With RINA, applications can request communication services to other applications by specifying the application name and the characteristics required for the service, without having to know the internal details of the network (DIF) that is providing this communication service, and without having to know where the destination application is executing. Virtualization is nothing special and part of the architecture, understanding virtualization as a mechanism to isolate a security and/or resource allocation domain (this is exactly what a DIF is). Furthermore, the behaviour of each DIF can be customized to optimally adapt to its operating conditions (as shown in the next section). All-in-all, RINA provides a better framework and toolset to support distributed computing. PRISTINE will use RINA to develop practical, demonstrable, and commercially exploitable solutions to address networking limitations associated to performance, efficiency, security, robustness and management. As such, the top-level objectives of PRISTINE are:
• To investigate the application of this recursive, programmable framework in a set of industry-lead, heterogeneous usage scenarios from different parts of the networking value-chain.
• To program mechanisms and techniques that will provide enhanced network performance, security, reliability and management; ultimately benefitting all the stakeholders in the networking ecosystem.
• To demonstrate the benefits that the PRISTINE paradigm can offer today, showing that a clean-slate architecture can be deployed in the current infrastructure and interoperate with the current Internet.