# ARCFIRE: Experimentation with the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture
## 4 Simplification of Network Management  
A graphic representation of a RINA network is the layered view of the original design, as shown in Section 2, focusing on the DIF layers and hiding the nodes in the background. A RINA network management system needs to visualize each node in isolation, with its DIF structure, and the dependencies between the DIFs. A graphic representation that is better suited for this is called an onion diagram, shown in Figure 7 for an example network. The DIFs in the nodes are connected (using the same color as the respective DIF). These connections show how the communication between IPCPs of the same DIF happens between nodes, including which other DIFs and physical layer DIF it crosses. Onion diagrams can show a large amount of nodes in the same graphic or figure, which allows for rapid manual comparison of nodes. This representation is a good visualization of potentially complex node configurations with DIF structure, DIF dependencies, required configuration of them, and involved IPCPs (adding some dots for them). One of the main insights during the ARCFIRE project was that the consequent application of RINA abstractions leads to significant improvements in configuration management, increasing performance of network management systems, decreasing management software complexity, and facilitating automation. In a network management system, a node can be created and validated independent of any other node, its configuration only requires its DIF and their connections (plus the DIF's QoS cubes). Management, especially performance management, will come down to how effective is congestion  
Figure 13: Physical systems present at the distributed mobility management experiment. management and resource allocation within a DIF. What is the loss rate due to congestion? What is the utilization of the graph? How often was it outside its QoS-cube? etc. This not only greatly simplifies management, but makes it much more quantifiable. A RINA network can be created and validated using only individual node configurations as has been demonstrated in the Rumba tool. From the network (nodes) graph, a DIF graph can be generated, showing all defined DIFs and their connections, and a graph with point-to-point connections between nodes, or multi-point if they are physically connected to a broadcast medium (referred to as a physical connectivity graph). After validating these two graphs, the IPCP graph can be generated showing all IPCPs with their DIFs and their connections. These representations are shown for the example network of Figures 14 and 15. A Distributed Management System (DMS) was created that uses this technique to validate a network [20]. Using the DMS, we have realized 50 test runs for 24 different networks on 6 different machines (spread over 3 different hardware platforms). Overall, we have run 6950 individual tests creating 945,400 nodes, 32,200 DIFs, 980,700 point-to-point DIFs, with 1,918,600 policy triggers. The number of created networks (or network segments) and the number of triggered DMS strategies is the same as the number of tests, 6950. All of this happened in a combined time of 55:42:05 h. In other words, we emulated creating the equivalent of 18.05% of all cells in the U.S (5,238,546) in under 2 days and 8 h. This means that this DMS strategy can handle configuration management for networks of extreme scale. Table 2 summarizes the results of the individual tests carried out during the network management experiments, for each of the different measured KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Figure 14: Visualizing a RINA network with an onion diagram. * Speed of node creation and validation. The average time to create or validate a node is 85 ms (on Raspberry Pi), 15 ms (on UNIX machines), and 3 ms (on Windows/Cygwin). The creation adds a node to a network with its configuration. The validation runs a topological sort over the nodes' configuration, and adds its DIFs and their structure to the network.