ARCFIRE will bring RINA from labs into the real-world. RINA, the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture, is an innovative “back-to-basics” network architecture that solves current limitations and facilitates full integration between distributed computing and networking. RINA addresses the challenges that drive the communications industry in moving from dedicated hardware to almost completely virtualised infrastructure. The next shift, 5G, on the horizon for 2020, will change thecommunication industry even more significantly. Now is the right time for ARCFIRE to provide experimental evidence of RINA’s benefits, at large scale, in compelling and realistic business cases, thus motivating RINA adoption.

ARCFIRE will experimentally demonstrate RINA’s key benefits integrating current EC investment in advanced networks (IRATI, PRISTINE) and Future Internet testbeds (FIRE+) focusing on 5 goals: 1) Facilitate comparison of converged operator networks using RINA to operator’s current network designs; 2) Produce a robust RINA software suite ready for Europe to engage in large-scale deployments and long-living experiments; 3) Provide relevant experimental evidence of RINA benefits to network operators, their equipment vendors, application developers and end-users; 4) Build on the current EU Future Internet community and raise the number of organisations involved in RINA development and deployment; 5) Enhance the FIRE+ infrastructure with ready to use RINA software.

ARCFIRE will achieve its main goal of experimentally verifying and quantifying some of the key benefits of the RINA architecture. To do so the project will perform three main sets of research and development activities, each one with their own inputs and outputs:

• Design of converged operator networks with RINA. The design and operation of converged service provider networks is the use case scenario of the project. ARCFIRE has chosen this scenario because it is the one that can best illustrate the benefits of RINA and allow for a greater diversity of experiments. ARCFIRE will take as an input the latest release of the RINA specification from the Pouzin Society, as well as the current state of the art in the design of converged networks (mainly contributed by ERICSSON and TID). The outputs this design activities will be a set of new and enhanced RINA specifications (contributed back to the Pouzin Society); the theoretical framework that will allow the design of the experiments and selection of KPIs and the set of new features in the RINA software suite that will need to be implemented by ARCFIRE.

• RINA software suite adaptation, enhancement and robustification. ARCFIRE will build on the results of FP7 IRATI, FP7 IRINA and FP7 PRISTINE and enhance the open source IRATI RINA software suite in order to make it compliant with the ARCFIRE requirements. This work will involve the design and development of new features required by the experimentation activities, but a good share of ARCFIRE’s development activities will go into maturing the RINA stack, making it more stable and automated to enable large-scale deployments and long-running experiments. The resulting RINA software suite will be contributed back to the IRATI open source project, to make it available to the individuals and organisations interested in experimenting with RINA.

• Large-scale experimentation with the IRATI RINA implementation on FIRE+ facilities. The core activities of the project will exploit the great catalogue of Future Internet experimental facilities available in FIRE+, as well as the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) at the US. ARCFIRE will look at a number of aspects in the operation of RINA-based converged operator networks to setup experiments that analyse and quantify some of the key benefits of RINA. Such aspects include the management of multi-layer networks, provisioning of reliable services over heterogeneous physical media, end-to-end service provisioning across multiple network operators and effectiveness against DDoS attacks. Experimental activities will produce the key result of ARCFIRE: experimentally verified and quantified RINA benefits over the current state of the art Internet architecture. A secondary but important output, which will be contributed back to FIRE+, are procedures and tools to facilitate large-scale RINA experimentation on FIRE+ experimental facilities.