ARCFIRE’s D2.2 Converged Service Provider Network Design Report [pdf] is now available for download at the deliverables area.

This report is intended to serve multiple purposes and to address multiple constituencies at the same time. Working on this document, we as the ARCFIRE partners, have improved our understanding of RINA and how its theory, architecture, and available implementations can help to improve current and future networks, and hopefully you will see this too. This is reflected in the structure and the content of this document.

Primarily, this report is the deliverable D2.2 of work package 2 of the H2020 project ARCFIRE. In this context, this document is to describe “the design of a converted operator using RINA (number and type of DIFs, connectivity graph of each Distributed IPC Facility (DIF), policies of each DIF, network manager strategies), and a comparison with current operator designs”, to quote the ARCFIRE description of work. As explained in the executive summary, we consider a converged operator network being a 5G network. Thus this report discusses such a network from two perspectives: an ideal world in which the 5G network is a RINA network (section 3) and a slightly less ideal world in which the 5G network benefits from a selected set of RINA added values and RINA-inspired set of added values as discussed in section 4. The defined experiments for ARCFIRE, introduced in section 5, finalise this aspect of this report.

Second, this document evaluates the potential value propositions of RINA and provides detailed discussions of important aspects for them. Those value propositions are detailed at the start of section 2 and several examples are then discussed in section 4 and for a 5G network in section 3. The general values of RINA are described in terms of the RINA theory (and section 4 provides a number of concepts inspired but it, for instance adaptive management strategies and a resource abstraction model) and the RINA architecture (with details of the DMS in section 4 and large number of all-RINA-5G use cases in section 3). The more practical values of RINA (here available RINA implementations) are described in terms of an ultimate RINA network (detailed on section 3 conceptually and in the 5G scenario sub-sections of section 4 practically), RINA implementations for a service (for instance the OMEC discussion in section 4), and RINA as an implementation of a part of a network (for instance in the radio access discussion in section 4).

Converged operator network structure: residential cellular access (Internet or VPN or app-specific DIF)

Third, this report (in section 3) provides the most comprehensive discussion on the RINA theory and more importantly the RINA architecture with regard to next generation networks, here as ideal RINA for 5G networks. Section 3 provides a comprehensive and condensed description and discussion of several RINA activities, from standardisation in the ETSI NGP to workshops and demonstrations at various venues over the past two years. Furthermore, this is the first time we are able to present RINA not just from a theoretical or general architectural perspective, but as a candidate solution for real problems in network architecture, design, and ultimately implementation. Fourth, this document takes a number of 5G scenarios and use cases, introduces them in sufficient detail, and explains how RINA in general and ARCFIRE in particular addresses their challenges. The first few sub-sections in section 4 provide those details. Thus this report can be used by 5G R&D efforts to investigate how a clean-slate network architecture of the quality of RINA can or could be used to improve several 5G scenarios.