TAPS and RINA: Do they fit together?

RINA, the Recursive InterNetwork Architecture, is a novel network architecture that has been proposed as an alternative to the current Internet. RINA comes with a new design and well-defined principles that attempt to solve the common problems of today's networks by returning to the fundamental aspects of networking and learning from past mistakes. However, because RINA is drastically different from existing technologies, it requires new approaches for gradual deployment on the Internet. The challenge of deploying new protocols has been addressed by TAPS, which is a new protocol-independent transport API. TAPS exposes a set of transport services to the applications by focusing on the transport features offered by a protocol rather than on the protocol itself. In this paper we investigate the possibility to enable RINA within the TAPS Architecture. This will allow for TAPS-compatible applications to benefit from RINA's advanced transport features without being redeveloped, thus potentially advancing the RINA deployment. Following the TAPS method of Internet protocol analysis, we list the transport features that RINA provides and discuss how they map to TAPS.