Norwegian Toppforsk-funded project to investigate RINA for 5 years

OCARINA (Optimizations to Comple Adoption of RINA), is the name of a new research project from the University of Oslo (UiO) that has just been funded by the Norwegian government, under its Toppforsk program. The project, led by Michael Welzl, has been awarded NOK 16 539 000 (approximately 1.75 M€) to investigate congestion control, routing and forwarding strategies for the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA), as well as deployment and adoption issues. OCARINA will have a duration of 5 years, starting October 2016. Congratulations to the UiO's team!!!

Project abstract. RINA, the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture, is a novel “back to basics” type approach to networking that is fundamentally different from today's networks. It shows great potential in many aspects of networking, e.g. by simplifying management and providing better security. The recursive nature of RINA calls for radically different approaches to how networking is performed, including congestion control and routing. In OCARINA, we will develop new congestion control and routing/forwarding mechanisms for RINA. Today, in the Internet, congestion control is performed end to end, but by locating the control closer to the entity that is being controlled, RINA should allow us to achieve much better performance. Also, in the Internet, routing is very static; in OCARINA we will research new dynamic ways to perform routing and forwarding. Our new mechanisms will be implemented, tested and evaluated in RINA, and we will see how RINA can be gradually deployed in (over / under / alongside) the Internet. In OCARINA, we will team up with leading international researchers to address these challenges. We expect to be able to show that RINA, with our new mechanisms, is indeed a much better solution for the Internet than TCP/IP in terms of performance. A goal is also to move RINA closer to real world deployment and motivate its adoption.