This week representatives of ARCFIRE partners attended the second ETSI NGP ISG meeting that took place in Sophia-Antipolis (France). Some ARCFIRE partners are actively participating in this group – whose goal is to re-architect the current communications protocols stack. During the meeting, ARCFIRE partners presented and discussed three contributions:

• A tutorial on how layers have been used in network and internetwork architectures to isolate different scopes, allocate resources in a divide-and-conquer fashion and allow networks to scale. RINA’s recursive structure emerges as a generalization of the repeating layering pattern observed in many architectures.

• A tutorial on the objects and names required for a complete computer network naming and addressing theory, and an analysis of the problems that happen when a subset of the object names/addresses are missing (such as in the current Internet).

• A study on the different Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN technologies that have been proposed in the last years, analyzing their uses of layering to allow the VPN provider to scale to a large number of customers with potentially large networks.