During my summer holidays, Id went to Brazil. I landed at Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo. My friend Joao picked me up from the airport to his home to enjoy a long summer holiday. On the way to his house, we were stuck in a high-density vehicular traffic jam. Joao explained that Sao Paulo is high-density populated, and the bottlenecks are always in every avenue in Sao Paulo. The Sao Paulo traffic jams make it challenging to move from one point to another, and it causes delays and poor quality of life for Sao Paulo citizens. I took advantage of this to explain to Joao what is my research about. I am working on the Recursive Inter-Networking Architecture (RINA), which can classify network traffic jams using policies. If Sao Paulo implements RINA QoS Cubes Policies, it could reduce the bottlenecks and the delays.

Traffic jam in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

How does RINA provide traffic differentiation?

RINA provides for Quality of Services (QoS) through QoS Cubes. The QoS Cubes are traffic classes that are employed to clasificate the Service Data Units (SDUs) that get into the DIF. This classification depends on several parameters (delay, packet loss, datarate, and among others). Each QoS Cube has asociated a policy for dealing with for dealing with flow control, routing, forwarding, scheduling, and congestion management. The DIFs provide the same type of service but with different characteristics depending on statistical bounds on metrics like data rate, latency, losses, and others. The application will request a service from the DIF based on its requirements (data rate, latency, losses, among others), and the DIF provides a flow with the QoS cube that matches these requirements. Each flow allocation request must contain as metadata the application requirements. The higher level DIF requests flow with a particular QoS to lower-level DIFs until the physical media is reached.

Traffic Differentiation with RINA QoS Cubes.