The Future of the Internet in the Making
Revolution or Back to Basics?
A work which starts fresh, taking into consideration all the lessons learned in the 35+ years of TCP/IP’s existence, OSI’s failure and other technologies lives was presented by John Day in his 2011 book “Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals”. The very main hypothesis is that every communication is an inter-process communication. This presents the very foundation of RINA – the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture.
RINA is a return to the basics of the general principles in computer networking with the objective to be applicable to every usage, while solving all the inherited issues of the legacy technologies.
Maximize the Invariants, Minimize the Discontinuities
By maximizing the invariant part of the networking functionalities, and minimizing the discontinuities, RINA separates the policy from the mechanisms rather than using separate protocols. Fine-tuned specificities can be put in place. Common mechanisms with different policies bring greater flexibility, dramatically simplifying networks rather than hundreds of protocols. There is a consistent repeating structure. In this approach there is thus far less chance to go wrong.
Only two protocols are needed: one for data transfer (EFCP) and one for application (CDAP).
Networking is a distributed application which is dedicated to provide IPC (Inter-Process Communication) services to other applications.
The Distributed IPC Facility (DIF) is the organizing structure which groups together the needed protocols. The DIF can be conceived as what we refer as layer. According to this view, networking is not a layered set of different functions but a single layer which repeats itself over different scopes.
This means that this single layer can recurse according to the needs of the network across wide ranges of scopes, QoS and bandwidth needed.