Improving Internet Performance with a "Clean-Slate" Network Architecture - The Case of RINA

Today’s Internet is facing significant challenges as the number of the connected devices, applications, and the amount of traffic grow tremendously. The challenges are particularly related to the insufficient security and performance, complexity in providing mobility and multihoming, and the inability to easily accommodate new protocols and technologies. Over the last two decades, there has been considerable effort by the networking research community to evolve or redesign the Internet architecture. Unlike evolutionary approaches, “clean-slate” designs follow a more drastic path to overcome the fundamental architecture limitations of the current Internet. However, such solutions are facing large deployment barriers, mainly because the Internet does not provide architectural modularity. Among the “clean-slate” initiatives, RINA—the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture—is perhaps the most drastic one which attempts to offer a general solution with a complete networking theory. In addition, the recursive nature of RINA introduces potential benefits in many aspects of networking such as management, routing, security, and congestion control. This dissertation tackles the deployment challenges and investigates several strategies to deploy a new clean-slate architecture such as RINA in the current networks. These strategies are: (1) direct usage with a fall-back, (2) adapting the Application Programming Interface (API), and (3) a gateway to translate between protocols. Real-life experiments of the first congestion control approach that is suitable for a flexible recursive architecture show the performance improvement that can be attained with these strategies