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Interplanetary Internet Tested In Space

Posted by timothy on Thu Sep 11, 2008 11:32 PM
from the best-place-for-it-really dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "After Vint Cerf planned the Interplanetary Internet, there's a press release saying that the Interplanetary Internet is now being tested in space, using the Bundle Protocol developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group. There's a conference paper with details on the testing too. These guys were previously the first to test IPv6 in space. Now they've found something with even fewer users than IPv6 to play with!"
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[+] Science: IPv6 Tested in Space 207 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Cisco router orbiting on a satellite in space? Well, it's now also the first to run IPv6 in space. Since no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground, isn't this a bit pointless?"
[+] Science: Vint Cerf Preps Interplanetary Internet Protocol 177 comments
TechFiends32 writes "After years of working with NASA to bring Internet connectivity to deep space, scientists say Vint Cerf's efforts may be nearing completion. To combat the apparent challenges of extending the Internet into space (such as meteors and weighty, high-powered antennas), Cerf and others have made significant efforts, like adjusting satellite-based IP, and working on delay-tolerant networking (DTN) to address pure IP's limitations in space. According to principal engineer at The Mitre Corp., Keith Scott, 'The 2010 goal is designed to bring DTN to a sufficient level of maturity to incorporate it into designs for robotic and human lunar exploration.'"
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Several readers sent in an update on DTN, the interplanetary Internet protocol that Vint Cerf has been working on for many years (and we have been discussing for nearly as long). The news now is that Cerf has added a DTN stack to the open source Android code, seeing uses in mobile applications for a protocol that does not assume a continuous connection.
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  • by davidwr (791652) on Thursday September 11 2008, @11:38PM (#24974077) Homepage Journal

    Does VoIP work when there's no sound in space?

    Cue packet-sending spacedwelling overlord jokes in 0101, 0011, 0001, ...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Your countdown must not like even numbers...

      • by davidwr (791652) on Thursday September 11 2008, @11:53PM (#24974177) Homepage Journal

        The e ar stil few b gs in the sy tem.

        • Re:drop ed pac ets (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2008, @12:30AM (#24974375)

          This allows for retransmissions from inside the network rather than having to retransmit data from the source, as is the case with TCP.

          No, this is not a best-effort protocol. Retransmission is required as in TCP, except in this case intermediary nodes along the route can take responsibility for retransmission of packets, whereas in TCP the source of the packet must carry out this role.

        • Naahhh, I think it's ok. It's just been slashdotted.

    • by William Robinson (875390) on Friday September 12 2008, @02:03AM (#24974809)

      Yep. It works like this.

      Peter: Hello.
      Malcom: (After 1 hour) Hello.
      Peter: (After 1 hour) Take the Nitro away from Sun.
      Malcom: (After 1 hour) What?
      Peter: (After 1 hour) Take the Nitro out of Sunshine U idiot.
      Malcom: NO CARRIER.

  • by 427_ci_505 (1009677) on Thursday September 11 2008, @11:40PM (#24974085)

    But not as we know it.

  • ET (Score:5, Funny)

    by Brain Damaged Bogan (1006835) on Thursday September 11 2008, @11:41PM (#24974095)
    can now get harassed to make savings on his long distance calls to his home planet
    • by plen246 (1195843) on Friday September 12 2008, @02:18AM (#24974887)

      Dear Blessed, I am writing you from Europa deeep ocean cause I halve heard you have Jen Rus heart and a sound mined.

      I am in ployed at the Banke of Europah as Estate Officer. Recently, highlee respected microbe, Sister d-R81, passed away with kno known daughter celles. Through good fortune and rewards for acts of kindeness, she gathered many microgrammes of sulfur during her blessed lyffe time. No Body has bean forward to claim her Estate for Six (6 )months she hs passed. Her Estate will be absorbed soon , with no Benefisheeary. She would have want it to be past to Sum Body to do good acts with and it will be wasteful to abzorb.

      Since your govment do not know yet of our existent, there is no risk too you. You will keep Sixty ( 6 0)per centage of sulfur that works out to 35.4 microgramms. I will collect theremainder when I have rode to yur plant on your spacecraft Galileo. My jupiter friend on Jupiter sent me that they have found this craft deliverd right to them.

      Do not bee concrnd word. I will be Benevolent dict-ator. Sulfuric economy be flourashing.

      Send yor contact lens numbers and sulfur banque code with which to strat transacshin now.

      Sincerelty,

      Royal Honnroble Emmannue^328*() 4532.4

      Banke of Europa

      • by Stooshie (993666) on Friday September 12 2008, @05:18AM (#24975673) Journal
        Dear Emmannue^328*() 4532.4, I am cery interested in your offer. But a few clarifications are needed. First is it 6 Jovian months or 6 earth months. Secondly, I have a group of investors willing to collectively invest. As proof of your intention could you send us 0.1 micrograms of the sulfur and a photo of yourself holding a piece of paper with the phrase "1 @m @n 1d10t". Thankyou. Blessed.
      • Ya know, ROFL is damn near literal in this case. Sweet. Evil but sweet.

        "Contact lens code". Very nice.
    • ET's finger (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      can now get harassed to make savings on his long distance calls to his home planet

      And also receive e-mails about pills that make his finger longer.

  • Give me subspace communication please...
  • Wait till you try to play World of Warcraft from MARS!
  • space pr0n (Score:5, Funny)

    by plopez (54068) on Thursday September 11 2008, @11:56PM (#24974199)

    can't wait for the space pr0n sites to pop up

  • oh great (Score:2, Informative)

    Are any of your penises too small for the girl or zerf of your dreams? Do you want that sense of fulfillment that only having all 9 penises firing on full gives you? Then 9-Alive is for you! You will no longer care if your gal or zerf has less than 4 breasts. You will feel the joy of the rings of Triga Seven or the scenic craters of Belka Miso as if you were there. You will be purple with pleasure like a youngling. 9-Alive will make you thrive like a supernova! Order now at IP 102.78.15.85.23.205.59.104.

  • Interplanetary Internet Tested In Space.

    Uhh, where else would they test it?

  • Hams had it in 1985 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bruce Perens (3872) * <bruce AT perens DOT com> on Friday September 12 2008, @12:12AM (#24974279) Homepage Journal
    Radio amateurs ran a wide area IP network over 1200 baud AX.25 half-duplex links in 1985, and wide area networks without IP before then. You could literally hear your packet being relayed from point to point. The IP software of the time (KA9Q NOS, and later on Linux) could handle the delays just fine. It wasn't the 30-minute delays of planetary communications, but certainly much slower than conventional IP networks, seconds per packet and tens of seconds for packets to be forwarded and acknowledged. Linux has had the features necessary to do this way back in the Waltje (Fred Van Kempen) networking software, before Alan Cox started working on it. Waltje was a Dutch CB packet enthusiast. Sometimes people turn that stuff on and don't realize they aren't the first ones.

    Bruce

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You could literally hear your packet being relayed from point to point.

      I am not surprised! Morse keys make a racket!

  • by DynaSoar (714234) on Friday September 12 2008, @12:36AM (#24974411) Journal

    Vint Cerf may have worked on the development, but the idea was covered by Vernor Vinge in 1992 ("A Fire Upon The Deep"). Yes, it was fiction, but Vinge drew on his knowledge as a computer scientist. He also betrayed himself as having more than a passing familiarity with the pitfalls and pratfalls of usenet message threads. "Hexapodia As The Key Insight" (Thanks, Jack.)

    • Excuse me if I am repeating obvious conclusions. My only gateway onto the 'Net is very expensive, and I don't get all messages.

      I agree on the Usenet references... It was eerily accurate, and very enjoyable. Also, I liked his concept of aliens, which were actually alien, rather than most sci-fi.
  • in getting a/s/l:

    vulcanary 108 years old/biological male but engineered female/YU5567. XH558, Vulcan
  • V 1.0 IPV4, world coverage, good speeds, Information Superhighway
    V 2.0 IPV6, much faster, light speed is the limit
    V 3.0 SSWW aka Solar System Wide Web, why run in a superhighway if you can crawl in the space?
  • What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DrBuzzo (913503) on Friday September 12 2008, @01:51AM (#24974755) Homepage
    Considering we don't have any systems to send anyone to another planet and the planetary exploration systems we have are only limited robotic probes, what exactly is the point?

    In terms of planetary travel it's actually one of the less difficult issues on the list to get communications systems working and figure out how to use systems with heavy delays. Nobody is going to be living on Mars until we have a way to get there and we're at least ten years away from a rocket that can even launch a sufficient payload.

    I'd just put this on the back burner until some of the other issues are taken care of. Even the most advanced plans for sending humans to Mars still are conceptual and no prototypes exist even.

    The Internet in near space (LEO or even the moon) does not have latency beyond what current protocols can deal with.
    • by John Meacham (1112) on Friday September 12 2008, @02:00AM (#24974799) Homepage

      So those limited robotic probes can communicate of course. Not having to invent a whole new protocol and being able to re-use existing sattelites for retransmission is a big win for future missions.

    • Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zarhan (415465) on Friday September 12 2008, @03:23AM (#24975143)

      Actually, Delay-tolerant Networking has applications that go beyond just space. One prime example is acoustic networks for oceanic monitoring - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4302188/4302189/04302341.pdf [ieee.org] has a nice paper about the application. Also, battlefield communications where there may be intermittent connectivity benefits from DTN.

      Anyway, the reason for getting direct IP connectivity to space probes is to reduce the overhead: If you can just say wget http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mars/opportunity/todayspic.jpg [nasa.gov] to access Oppy's camera instead of having to go through various hoops it makes everyones work easier. Combine this with dynamic and automatic routing (for example, for solar oppositions)..So yes, mostly the benefits are for scientists and engineers in space projects.

    • You're talking like working on a way of networking things excludes *also* working on a way to get people to Mars.

      It seems unlikely to me that the people working on this are the same set of people designing propulsion systems, and ways of sustaining life on other planets.

  • Arthur C. Clarke envisaged this problem years ago for 2001.

  • Nothing new here. FidoNet [wikipedia.org] has been providing latency tolerant networking since the 1980s. Just ask our friends in Cuba, they're still using something similar, but thumb drives and USB key fobs means the packet size can be well over a Gigabyte. Put that in your pipe I mean 'series of tubes', and smoke it!

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Just to clear up what seems to be a common confusion, DTN is *not* IP for space. It is a new networking stack that can work *over* IP, but fundamentally uses a store and forward architecture, and can uses other physical or transport layers. It will work with minibuses driving around rural africa, and it will allow "bundles" to be eventually delivered to probes that are in the shadow of a planet. See dtnrg.org

  • We could connect and control the aim of the camera. And the images would get sent back to Earth, etc, etc, etc.

    Then we place one one Mars...

    Fun, and we get to test this "interplanetary internet" thing...

    Doesn't seem all that hard to do...
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dude, if you're going to FP, do it right.

      Make it worth our while. We want to read trollposts of epic proportions. We want to see that you've done your homework. We want to feel the cognitive dissonance of simultaneous +1 informative and -1 troll(though -1 flamebait is also acceptable).

      We've read niggers, goatse, coprophilia, homosexual anal sex, and bestiality. The clock is ticking -- the more others post, the less likely that you will innovate before they do.

      It's a tough world, man. Getting the firs