The Connection Manager is initialized by RLNH. It is responsible for providing reliable, in-order delivery of messages and for notifying RLNH when the connection to the peer becomes available / unavailable. An RLNH link is created maps a unique name to a Connection Manager object.

As soon as the Connection Manager has indicated that the connection is up, RLNH transmits an RLNH_INIT message to the peer carrying its protocol version number. Upon receiving this message, the peer responds with an RLNH_INIT_REPLY message indicating whether it supports the given protocol version or not. When remote and local RLNH versions differ the lowest of the two versions are used by both peers. If the message exchange has been successfully completed, RLNH is ready to provide messaging services for the link name. The RLNH protocol is stateless after this point.