Intelsat Launches Hardware For Internet Routing From Space 83
coondoggie writes "A radiation-proof Cisco router was sent into space today aboard an Intelsat satellite with the goal of setting up military communications from space. The router/satellite combo is a key part of the US Department of Defense's Internet Routing In Space (IRIS) project, which aims to route IP voice, video and data traffic between satellites in space in much the same way packets are moved on the ground, reducing delays, saving on capacity and offering greater network flexibility, Cisco stated."
Intelsat by Cisco (Score:3, Interesting)
If they manufactured it in China then the back door is already built in by the factory so the Chinese can read all traffic or interdict it in a crisis.
mcmurdo.gov (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the earlier days of the less popular Internet, I used to get a kick out of pining mcmurdo.gov , the US base in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica [google.com], because it was as far as I could reach on the Net (ping times usually about 800ms). Before I'd traveled very much around the physical globe, I'd stretch my imagination to the scale spanning "me to McMurdo".
I'm really psyched to look forward to pinging Jupiter.
Re:Not even Cisco (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought I read somewhere that lead is exactly the wrong thing to use if you're shielding against cosmic rays. While cosmic rays themselves are most likely to pass right through human bodies or sensitive electronics without "hitting" anything important. If you shield with lead, the cosmic rays do an excellent job busting alpha (or was it beta) radiation loose from the lead itself, which then wreaks havoc when those particles collide with humans or electronics in the surrounding environment.
Particle physicists, please chime in here and correct my (I am sure numerous) errors.
Advantages of on Satellite Routing... (Score:1, Interesting)
Latency is a bitch. As someone who has worked closely with IP based satellite solutions the average latency to a geosynchronous satellite (ones that are over the same spot on the earth at all times) is about 80 ms each way, or 160ms round trip. To get data from a war zone, such as the middle east, over a wholly government controlled satellite network, back to the US would take at least two satellite hops for a total of at least 320ms in addition to any other equipment delay. This becomes even more problematic with IP, since packet acknowledgment takes an additional 320ms from the end point. To ack a single packet is pushing a second when equipment delays are factored in. In addition satellite has inherently higher error rates. A second problem that this system addresses is power. Any transmission medium adds noise. A normal satellite just repeats signals back to earth adding even more noise. The way to combat noise is more power, which in turn adds more noise and limits the amount of data that can be sent relative to the bandwidth.
This system addresses both of those problems. First since signals are sent satellite to satellite, a single ground trip can be avoided. This savings can be up to 160ms one way or 320ms round trip, although in practice it would be less to account for the distance between satellites. The second issue, the power problem, is that since signals are reformed on the satellite you only need enough power to reach the satellite, rather than enough to reach the satellite and back to earth. This saves power and improves signal integrity all around. This all serves to reduce packet loss and improve the overall utilization of resources.
Re:No Viop for you (Score:3, Interesting)
I see a few advantages to this
The first is it reduces the latency when two forward bases want to communicate with each other.
The second is that it means your forward bases can communicate with each other even if your main base is somehow knocked out.
The third is it reduces the load on the downlink to main base.
Of course there are trade-offs to smart satellites, you can't use more complex modulation to get more out of an existing channel for example but you can't easily do that anyway if your satellite is serving lots of ground stations and we are getting pretty close to the limit on modulation efficiency anyway. So I think your "obsolete in two years" is overstating the case severely.