NASA Tests Deep-Space Network Modeled On the Internet 109
hcg50a writes "NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. The store-and-forward protocol was designed by NASA in consultation with Vint Cerf. Here's a discussion from last July before the test began."
Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
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Porn, obviously.
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this perhaps...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna [wikipedia.org]
their first message (Score:2, Funny)
5th post
DRM (Score:3, Funny)
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I've just copyrighted the term subcasting.
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A word is not copyrightable.
Re:DRM (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but while you guys were talking about that, I trademarked Subcasting (TM).
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(Which is why I got the copyright. I didn't say it made any sense, but luckily they didn't seem to mind.)
Store anf forward.. could it be... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Are you being sarcastic or just stupid?
I am going to assume the later. Whereas imagine e-mail being a train car, and TCP/IP (i.e. internet) being the railroad tracks. The tracks will use switches and routers to set the fastest path for you. E-mail does store and forward, however it does it point-to-point (origin to destination).
So you load up the train car with apples for grandma, and send it towards grandma. The car will tell the switch operators where you want to go and they will make all of the requir
Re:Store anf forward.. could it be... (Score:4, Informative)
With space you have no internet (i.e. road) and TTLs are too high to use the same technology we use here.
You might think so, but it *has* been shown to work. I mean, don't tell me you never heard of the pigeon [cnet.com] protocol [ietf.org]?
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Pigeons in space... I need to say no more.
Re:Store anf forward.. could it be... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if you throw them in the right direction with the right velocity...
Assuming you don't have to enter or exit any atmospheres, it could work. The catching site would be messy, and would give Mike Rowe an excuse to go into space.
It would just be a "dead pigeon" protocol.
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I have just patented a method of transferring data between planets, wherein a party at location A launches a carrier pigeon with a message attached, and a party at location B has a giant baseball mitt to catch the pigeon.
And if that doesn't work out, I am copyrighting my list of ingredients for my Finger-Licking Fried Pigeon recipe...
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Hmm, you could combine both of those.
Coat the (live, perhaps) pigeon with butter, and then throw it hard enough that it gets fried in flight, assuming you are in an atmosphere. You might need to add a bit of aluminum foil to even out the heating.
Data and a meal.
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Nah, Swallows would be better. They can hold larger packets. Up to a certian size, they can just grip it by the husk, after that, it just takes two of 'em with the packet on a line.
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African, European, or Alien swallows?
(assuming that the airspeed velocity is irrelevant here...)
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Any way we could change this to the "interstellar monkey excrement" protocol?
Monkeys test way better in the 9-50 set. :-P
Just imagine, monkeys flinging interstellar poo-communiques throughout the universe. Damn the spice, give me monkeys! ;-)
Cheers
On the use of Excrement Packet Protocol ... (Score:1)
One word: Fecenet. (Excrenet? Internet Number 2(.0)?)
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Whereas imagine e-mail being a train car, and TCP/IP (i.e. internet) being the railroad tracks.
That's confusing. Can you rewrite that as a car analogy?
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why do you assume e-mail means TCP/IP?
i guess you don't remember UUCP? yep, that was a store-and-forward protocol, which evolved into a 'network of networks' working to get e-mail and netnews before the Internet.
Designed to survive galactic warfare... (Score:2, Funny)
...and route around event horizons.
very exciting (Score:5, Insightful)
It really kills me when people dismiss developments in space programs as being too far removed (no pun intended) from the rest of us to be relevant.
Remember FIDONet (Score:5, Informative)
We already have a working _global_ _worldwide_ _free_ network based on store-and-forward protocols.
It's called FIDONet. It's almost dead now, but it was very alive during early 90-s before the advent of cheap Internet.
Kids...
Re:Remember FIDONet (Score:5, Funny)
We already have a working _global_ _worldwide_ _free_ network based on store-and-forward protocols.
It's called FIDONet. It's almost dead now, but it was very alive during early 90-s before the advent of cheap Internet.
Kids...
We shall, respectfully, remove ourselves from your lawn.
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I was about to say the same thing - FIDONet, RIME, etc... etc... Store-and-forward message networks are old hat. NASA is just late to the 'everything must be web-enabled' party.
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We already have a working _global_ _worldwide_ _free_ network based on store-and-forward protocols.
It's called FIDONet. It's almost dead now, but it was very alive during early 90-s before the advent of cheap Internet.
Kids...
The best thing is if NASA used FIDONet think of the money they'd save by only sending messages to Deep Space at 3am when the tolls are cheapest!
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UUCPNet, Pathalias, and the UUCP Mapping Project.
Kids, indeed.
--
ihnp4!stolaff!bungia!foundln!john
Beat me to it. (Score:4, Interesting)
UUCPNet, Pathalias, and the UUCP Mapping Project.
Kids, indeed.
I still have several names registered with the UUCP Mapping Project as of their shutdown (freezing the namespace).
Some of them still exchange mail via UUCP, too. Both with each other and the rest of the net. B-)
(In fact one of those rest-of-the-net links was down for a while and came back up right after McColo was cut off. B-> )
= = = =
Running mailing lists with a periodic UUCP link in the path has an additional side-effect: It limits the traffic explosion from mail loops that are not detected to a manageable volume, giving the admin time to shut down the offending address.
= = = =
I understand that UUCP mailnet is ALREADY in use in Africa in a very interesting form:
- Villages have a WiFi-enabled machine to exchange mails and files with the outside world.
- The local mail carrier has a bicycle with a WiFi-enabled, battery-powered machine with a decently large disk.
- As he cycles from village to village the bike-mounted machine associates with the local machine and UUCP does its usual magic, transferring mail, files, and download requests. (Don't know if they also run netnews groups on it...
- One of the machines on his route has internet connectivity and transfers the mail, files, and download requests to the rest of the world.
All with legacy protocols doing what they always did. And he doesn't even have to stop pedaling. B-)
UUCP over IP (Score:2)
From /etc/services:
Still works if you've got UUCP neighbors configured.
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What RFC# is that? Please tell me SOMEONE wrote it up.
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Well, according to the "Font of all (quick) wisdom" [wikipedia.org], the "official" name for this is IntetPlaNet [wikipedia.org] which is backed in part by the (wait for it) InterPlanetary Internet SIG [ipnsig.org] (that's Special Interest Group to you youngins).
They seem to have a whole bunch of papers on their website which might be easier to digest than an RFC, but the easiest way to find the RFC is to just google for "RFC DTN".
Delay-Tolerant Networking Architecture [ietf.org]
Sadly it just defines the DTN architecture and is much less enjoyable than rfc2549 [ietf.org] (
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I understand that UUCP mailnet is ALREADY in use in Africa in a very interesting form: - Villages have a WiFi-enabled machine to exchange mails and files with the outside world. - The local mail carrier has a bicycle with a WiFi-enabled, battery-powered machine with a decently large disk. - As he cycles from village to village the bike-mounted machine associates with the local machine and UUCP does its usual magic, transferring mail, files, and download requests. (Don't know if they also run netnews groups on it... - One of the machines on his route has internet connectivity and transfers the mail, files, and download requests to the rest of the world. All with legacy protocols doing what they always did. And he doesn't even have to stop pedaling. B-)
[Citation needed]
-l
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I understand that UUCP mailnet is ALREADY in use in Africa in a very interesting form: - Villages have a WiFi-enabled machine to exchange mails and files with the outside world.
[Citation needed]
Sorry. Heard about it at a conference a couple years ago by one of the participants.
I can try to hunt them up but no promises.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizzy_Digital_Courier [wikipedia.org]
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Here's some cites (Score:2)
[Citation needed]
A simple google search for "uucp bicycle motorcycle wifi" brought up a number of such things.
One was the "motoman" project [islamonline.net], which is essentially what I described but with mororcycles in Cambodia.
Here's a page in the OLPC project Wiki the motoman page [laptop.org] on the OLPC project Wiki, which gives this and several other
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I am already behind on my mandatory
20+ option on the poll tonight.
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Same problem :)
I'm seriously thinking about FireFox extension which will stop opening new Wikipedia links after 20-30 minutes of reading Wikipedia pages.
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Yes, FIDONet is the name of the network (like Internet).
There are standard protocols in FIDO, like in Internet. They are specified by FidoNet Technical Standards Committee documents (http://ftsc.org/docs/) . All FIDONet nodes must implement a minimal subset of specifications to receive direct netmail.
In practice, FIDO worked over any media capable of file transfer. I received my echomail with a custom 2400-bps modem from radio _broadcasts_.
Good times...
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It's called FIDONet. It's almost dead now
Kids...
It's not dead at all. I had no idea FIDONet nodes were so rampant with russian wives!
Fidonet.org --> Active Nodes = http://www.ftngate.net/fidonet/ [ftngate.net]
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Disruption Tolerant Network protocols certainly have a place in ad-hoc wireless networks where bit-error rates are high and link outages are common.
One of the drawbacks of a DTN is the fact that intermediate nodes require greater complexity and memory for the store-and-forward.
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True, but wouldn't that be just as true for any wireless mesh that tries to handle reliable connections over paths that can change pseudo-randomly on-the-fly? DTN is presumably no more expensive on the compute cycles or memory than any of the 200+ methods on Citeseer for doing the same job specifically for terrestrial wireless, but is presumably much more versatile as it was designed to handle far worse situations.
Talking of noisy links, are there any open source implementations of Turbo Codes? (This is an
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Is this not what you want?
http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/turbocodes/overview [opencores.org]
project looks dead, though.
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Yes, that's the stuff, but - yuk - it looks very incomplete. It's unclear as to what's there and what isn't, VHDL isn't an easy format to work in, and it'd take a while for even those who know what they're doing to get that into any reasonable shape. I don't even come close to that level of expertise in signals theory.
I've bookmarked it and will start hacking on the code this weekend.
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Re:very exciting (Score:4, Funny)
The rest of the post will come within the hour. Or maybe next week.
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The rest of the post will come within the hour. Or maybe next week.
My thoughts exactly. I can imagine that by 'next week' the spam would be out of date and the links already dead.
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So thats another added bonus of the protocol, right?
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Read your post again, and instead of EMAIL, think A LETTER IN AN ENVELOPE.
Or, were you actually being so awesomely sarcastic that I've missed it as well?
Yay! (Score:3, Funny)
Previous method... (Score:1, Funny)
The previous technique of interplanetary messenger pigeons was obviously lobbied against by PETA as a disgusting abuse of animals.
Finally (Score:2, Funny)
Revenge will be mine!
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until they market their poetry sessions with free samples in every email.
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Who knows? They may be interested in a Russian wife.
bollocks (Score:4, Insightful)
Deep space my arse! Its just space. We've not even stepped out of our own little planet-moon system yet and we think we want to start using up space-faring superlatives. Morons! Soon the term deep-space will be about as meaningful as artificial intelligence (assuming deep-space was ever a meaningful term in the first place). If this system is for "deep-space" then what will we call a communication protocol that works well between stars?
Anyone in marketing, kill yourself! - Bill Hicks
Re:bollocks (Score:5, Funny)
then what will we call a communication protocol that works well between stars
Interstellar?
Re:bollocks (Score:4, Funny)
I think Microsoft may have been considering the scope of this problem for a long time. They stopped the hubristic practice of naming "guaranteed unique" identifiers as UUIDs (Universally Unique IDentifiers) and started referring to them as GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers.)
Why would they change horses in the middle of the race, with all the expense of changing documentation, supporting two naming systems, and all of the resultant confusion, unless there was a reason to not refer to them as "Universal"?
OK, maybe it's because they were trying to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" the RFC defining UUIDs. But I'd prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that they were "forward thinking", looking at the problems of networking in space.
BWA HA HA HA! Sorry, I couldn't keep a straight face for that last bit.
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Deep Space refers to anything outside of Earth orbit. The EPOXI probe [wikipedia.org] (previously called Deep Impact) is orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, so is definitely in deep space.
The distinction is useful because most earth-orbiting satellites can be communicated with using relatively small antennas, whereas deep space probes are orders of magnitude farther away and require a network of much larger dishes (ie, the Deep Space Network [wikipedia.org]).
They should've chosen a more secure model (Score:1)
It's time to hack the ISS (Score:2)
So all the displays on the space station have in large print this message displayed:
ALL OF THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
That would be fun.
Searching Doom 3 servers... (Score:5, Funny)
CLANWARS_PUBLIC#1 LAVAPIT-BIG UDP 56
LOL-GIBBERISHED OH!NOSHIT_ctf UDP 68
PLAYTIME.DOT.UK DM_HOLYGROUNDS UDP 254
FRAGFEST_REDPLANET DM_HELLHOLE UDP 2,139,442
Ping of 2 MILLION? WTF ?!?
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Secret Identity? (Score:2)
Ever notice that you never see Al Gore and Vint Cerf in the same place.
Ping ? (Score:2)
Oh noes !
We slashdotted Mars !
Security? Authentication? Privacy? Anonymity? (Score:2)
I see no mention of these measures, and am not amused by this ridiculous lack of foresight if in fact they are omitted. These need to be present from the start, not attempted to tack on later.
It would be much easier for anybody to spy on backbone communications in this giant wireless system than what we currently have with wired backbones.
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I see no mention of these measures, and am not amused by this ridiculous lack of foresight if in fact they are omitted. These need to be present from the start, not attempted to tack on later.
They are not omitted. RFC5050 discusses the authentication and security requirements in addition to the bundle protocol specification. However, note that it would be inefficient to implement authentication and security on every node -- it's sufficient to implement them on the boundaries of a controlled network.
Since this is designed for use over very expensive, highly controlled links (e.g. the Deep Space Network), anonymity/privacy wasn't really a high priority. However, the protocol doesn't preclude sendi
finally, bittorrent porn on the moon! (Score:1)
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I thought it was already working like this (Score:2)
The need for store-and-forward seems obvious to me due to the high latencies, and I thought it had always been working like this. Maybe it's hard to evolve in that area due to the long time needed to prepare each project and the risk of failure.
NASA consulted Vint Cerf? (Score:2)