RINA: an architecture for policy-based dynamic service management
Wang, Yuefeng; Esposito, Flavio; Matta, Ibrahim; Day, John
Management is a vital component for delivering requested network services. The inability of the current Internet architecture to accommodate modern requirements has spurred attempts to provide novel network management solutions. Existing approaches often restrict the range of policies that can be employed to adapt to diverse network conditions. They are also tailored either to a specific set of (management) applications, or to the current Internet architecture, inheriting its shortcomings, for example adopting its incomplete (static) addressing architecture or ad-hoc solutions that result in so-called ``layer violations." In this paper, we describe a novel management architecture developed from first principles to enable the specification of various policies. To this end, we identify common underlying mechanisms, based on the unifying principle that any management application consists of processes maintaining and sharing distributed states of information objects for the purpose of delivering a network service. This principle underlies our Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA), where the notion of a ``layer" represents such state sharing among processes and such layers can be repeated over different scopes and stacked to provide more effective wide-area services. We present a management framework that enables application programmers to specify four types of policies for managing a layer, the network, the naming of services, and an application, and use our prototype implementation to demonstrate adaptation to changing communication and load requirements.
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