Publication

White paper

The RAHN white paper is the project's formal statement: what problem it attacks, what model it proposes, and — unusually for a white paper — which claims are marked with their status. Sections carry explicit markers: [Implemented], [Implemented for v0.1 scope], and scoped language where evidence is still partial.

What it covers

• Problem and motivation (§3–4) — why network state has no first-class object today, and what follows from that absence.
• Existing abstractions and related work (§5–6) — config management, SDN, IBN, formal verification, and content-addressed systems; the survey is explicitly a working draft whose provisional claims must be deepened before any novelty assertion.
• Conceptual model (§9–13) — network state, state identity, transitions, and the constitution.
• Verification and execution (§14+) — what is implemented for the v0.1 scope and how the boundary to real execution is drawn.
• Causal memory and evolution — asserted causality with epistemic status; branching and fail-closed merging.

The claim-status discipline

Most white papers assert; this one grades itself. A claim is either implemented (and test-enforced), experimentally demonstrated (with recorded method and environment), or open. The limitations baseline backs this: no novelty claims are warranted yet, the prior-art analysis must be deepened, and v1.0 is architectural stability — not production readiness. The paper cannot assert past the baseline even if a section reads better with a stronger claim.

Reading paths

• Technical reader: white paper §9–14, then the specifications.
• Research reader: §5–6, then the research program and open experiments.
• Skeptical reader: the limitations first — they are the shortest honest description of the project.

Citation metadata is available in the repository's CITATION.cff.