This document summarizes research on congestion control in the Recursive InterNetworking Architecture (RINA). RINA addresses problems with TCP scalability in the Internet by breaking the network into separate Distributed Inter-Process Communication Facilities (DIFs) with their own congestion control. This allows for shorter control loops and controlling flow aggregates within DIFs. It also enables different congestion control mechanisms per DIF. Simulation results showed RINA provided local stability and global fairness between flows, as well as enabling in-network resource pooling across DIFs. Future work areas include buffer management between DIFs, evaluating different hop-by-hop controllers, further analyzing resource pooling and interactions between DIF congestion control policies.

1. Congestion Control in the
Recursive InterNetworking Architecture
(RINA)
Presenter: Stein Gjessing
Authors: Peyman Teymoori, Michael Welzl, Stein Gjessing, UiO, Norway
Eduard Grasa, i2CAT, Spain
Roberto Riggio, Kewin Rausch, Domenico Siracusa, CREATE-NET, Italy
May 24, 2016

2. 2
Congestion Control in the Internet
• Problems with the Internet:
– TCP scalability with:
• The diameter of the network
• The number of flows
• The bottleneck link capacity
– Split-TCP (PEPs):
• IPsec and SSL
• Scalability with the number of flows
• Processing delay at splitters
• This presentation: Highlighting RINA Congestion Control (CC) benefits
Showing that improvements that have been done to TCP on the
internet "naturally appear" with RINA without their side effects
PEP: Performance Enhancing Proxy

3. 3
Recursive InterNetworking Architecture
(RINA)
• A back to basics approach learning from the
experience with TCP/IP
• In RINA, every layer (called a “Distributed
InterProcess Communication (IPC)
Facility” (DIF)) has the same set of mechanisms
and goal:
– providing and managing the communication among
its entities
• Behaviour is defined by “policies” that can be
programmed differently in various DIFs.

4. 4
Some DIF Configurations in RINA
• Two possible RINA stack configurations by
different organizations of “Distributed
InterProcessCommunication Facilities” (DIFs)

5. 5
Implementation – the general scheme
• Aggregate Congestion Control (ACC)
“Error and Flow Control Protocol” (EFCP),
“Relaying and Multiplexing Task” (RMT),
“Resource Allocation” (RA).

6. 6
Horizontal: Consecutive DIFs
Topology: Results:

7. 7
Vertical: Stacked DIFs
Topology: Results:
1 sender, 1 receiver:
Sender sends flow 1 (large) at 0,
and flow 2 (small) at time 10.

8. 8
Around: In-Network Resource Pooling
• A follow-up to: Psaras, Ioannis, Lorenzo Saino, and George Pavlou. "Revisiting
Resource Pooling: The Case for In-Network Resource Sharing." Proceedings of the
13th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks. ACM, 2014
• Easily implementable in RINA by an RMT routing policy
S1
S2
R1
R2
Router1
Router3
Router2
Router4
10 Mbps
10 Mbps
2 Mbps
3 Mbps
3 Mbps
10 Mbps
10 Mbps
10 Mbps
local stability, global fairness (1:1)
Result: Jain’s fairness index for the two flows was 0.999, which shows global fairness
while local stability was provided through RINA-ACC

9. 9
Discussion
• RINA can solve the Internet problems by
– breaking up the long control loop into shorter ones,
– controlling flow aggregates inside the network, and
– enabling the deployment of arbitrary congestion
control mechanisms per DIF.

10. 10
Future work
• how to effectively manage buffers between DIFs,
• which hop-by-hop congestion controllers are best to use, given their
stability and scalability properties,
• how to best apply in-network resource pooling,
• effects of different congestion control policies at lower DIFs on
congestion control policies of upper DIFs, and
• how large a DIF can be without performance degradation, and how
its scalability can be improved.

11. 11
Thank you!
Questions?