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Vint Cerf Preps Interplanetary Internet Protocol
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 24, 2008 02:57 PM
from the would-be-helpful-at-the-jupiter-hotel-too dept.
from the would-be-helpful-at-the-jupiter-hotel-too dept.
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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[+]
Technology: Vint Cerf on Why TCP/IP Was So Long in Coming 83 comments
whitehartstag writes "TCP/IP is 25 years old this year. Vint Cerf says there was a long development cycle for both TCP/IP and for X.25, and we'd have been using TCP/IP much sooner if TCP/IP had been more marketable. 'Over the years, we can come up with many examples both of where the best technology did (or did not) win and of how marketing has defined a service. For example, many of the "best" features of frame relay, such as the ability to use Switched Virtual Circuits (SVC) in addition to Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC) were never widely marketed because the pricing was too complex. Rather, the PVC was a simple replacement for a leased line at a fraction of the cost with better performance.'"
[+]
Technology: TCP/IP Meets Physical Reality 72 comments
An anonymous reader writes "When Google is clouding
the borderline between web and the desktop, a much, much smaller
project is blurring the border between the Internet and the
physical reality: the newly released Contiki
operating system version 2.2.1. Contiki runs on networked wireless
sensors that are used for anything from road
tunnel monitoring for fire rescue operations to collecting vital
statistics from ice hockey players. These sensors
typically have as little as a few kilobytes of memory and a few
milliwatts of power budget — a thousandth of the resources of a
typical PC computer — yet Contiki provides them with full TCP/IP
connectivity. Meanwhile, San Francisco is monitoring parking spaces with wireless technology."
[+]
Technology: Interplanetary Internet Tested In Space 124 comments
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!"
[+]
Technology: NASA Tests Deep-Space Network Modeled On the Internet 109 comments
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."
[+]
Technology: ISS Launches First Permanent Node of "Interplanetary Internet" 121 comments
schliz writes "Researchers developing the 'Interplanetary Internet' have launched its first permanent node in space via a payload aboard the International Space Station. The network is based on a new communications protocol called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). It will be tested heavily this month, and could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year. The Interplanetary Internet is the brainchild of Vint Cerf ('father of the Internet'), among others. Last year, NASA tested the technology on the Deep Impact spacecraft." Update: 07/13 20:01 GMT by KD : If by "permanent" we mean seven years.
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More work to be done (Score:5, Funny)
I assume then that at some point someone will have to write up a new RFC on "IP Over Space-Avian Carrier"?
KA9Q (Score:5, Informative)
Phil Karn's old KA9Q implementation of TCP (for amateur radio) was designed to accommodate very long delays.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Phil Karn's old KA9Q implementation of TCP (for amateur radio) was designed to accommodate very long delays.
Only because it takes such a long time to tap out IP packets in morse code.
mooncam (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:mooncam (Score:5, Informative)
actually there is no such thing as an earthrise on the moon, as the moon does not 'rotate' in relation to it's movement around the earth. At any point on the surface of the moon facing the earth, the earth will always be in the same point in the sky, always.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
actually there is no such thing as an earthrise on the moon, as the moon does not 'rotate' in relation to it's movement around the earth. At any point on the surface of the moon facing the earth, the earth will always be in the same point in the sky, always.
An 'earthrise' is still possible, you just have to put the mooncam on a buggy and drive in the correct direction.
Re:mooncam (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong.
Libration causes the visible face of the moon to oscillate slightly.
Therefore, you can see an Earthrise from certain points on the moon without being in motion relative to the moon yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Rotation != the only thing that can cause Earthrise.
Re:mooncam (Score:4, Interesting)
"Earthrise" is the name given to the famous picture taken of the earth from the moon. You have most likely seen it, it's the most famous picture of the Earth.
Africa is prominently visible in the picture, if you're curious.
Parent
Re:mooncam (Score:4, Informative)
Your argument seems good at the surface, but it's not true!
The truth is that the Moon librates [wikipedia.org] a bit (a few degrees), so there actually ARE earthrises when you are near the edge of the Earth-observable Moon surface. The Earth just doesn't do a full circle around the sky, it travels along a Lissajous figure.
Even Wikipedia is incorrect on this, at least when you look up "Earthrise".
Parent
Re:mooncam (Score:4, Informative)
Before anyone questions this: The angular span of the Moon's libration is a few times larger than the angular diameter of the Earth as seen from Moon.
Parent
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Re: (Score:2)
Earthrise on Moon IS possible. Moon's orbit is not a perfect circle, that's why we have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librations [wikipedia.org]
In the best case Earth rises at about 15 degrees.
Bold (Crazy) Prediction (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe not, but wouldn't it be crazy if it was?
Re: (Score:2)
The only way to make ipv6 is to force it down the throats of the ISPs. Too bad force and business don't mix. Unless it's the businesses that force something through(like the DMCA)...
Re: (Score:2)
From TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be extrapolating quite a bit to say that this scheme is much more vulnerable to critical data loss. (And your claim about DoS is pretty irrelevant when you consider that all implementations of this protocol will be owned by NASA and their associates.)
Do you really think, based on just TFA, that Vint Cerf of all people would design such a flawed protocol? The point of custody transfer is that retransmissions can be handled by the routers that form the network, rather than wasting precious power using a planetside rover that has better things to do.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I understand why they want to do it this way, but the seperation of responsibility was put there for a reason in TCP waaaaay back in the DARPA days so that if any link goes down you have no data loss. What happens if critical data is being transmitted from a source, and the source gets cut off. The retransmitting router gets hit by a meteor and is trashed. Critical data loss. Am I missing something?
Um, if you only have one retransmitting router, then you'll loose your critical connection to that end point i
Re:From TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't simply send your packet and then wipe your cache. You keep the packets at every hop it traverses until you know that it has arrived at its destination, so that you can resend it in case of a transmission error or fatal equipment failure.
Especially since you, with these distances, can have a large chunk of data in transit between two satellites due to the slow pace of light and radio waves.
That, along with the limited transmission speeds, is also one of the reasons why you do not want to resend lost packets all the way from the originator, which is still possible in the worst case scenario where the data is lost in all the routing satellites.
Unless the probe, or Mars lander or whatever also loose the data before it gets through.
Actually, such a system is more secure, from a data loss point of view, since the data can get through even if it is lost at both the originator and at some point in transfer, since it can be resent by any router that it has passed through.
It makes sensitive data vulnerable to interception though... In case some aliens where to abduct a satellite that's caching data before it can be purged. =)
Parent
Excellent (Score:3, Funny)
Now we'll be able to send e-mail to Dr Edgar Mitchell's aliens and ask them if they exist !
Great! (Score:2)
Soon Davidson will be able to spam martians.
In related news ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
So what, their Death Star gets in the way too often?
Re: (Score:2)
No, that would be AT&T.
Alien Ascii Pr0n (Score:2)
Interplanetary ICMP (Score:2, Funny)
~$ traceroute voyager2.heliopause.net
traceroute to voyager2.heliopause.net (207.46.193.254), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.0.15 (192.168.0.15) 0.180 ms 0.186 ms 0.205 ms
2 netblock.dslcarrier.com (66.159.218.1) 14.379 ms 17.076 ms 20.048 ms
3 satrptr.spacenet.net (66.51.203.33) 36.531 ms 45.014 ms 42.245 ms
4 mars.spacenet.net (206.223.143.41) 92.229 ms 101.596 ms 99.575 ms
5 jupiter.spacenet.net (216.239.43.12) 220.073 ms 266.554 ms 254.288 ms
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Man I wish I could afford a faster than light connection like you... Here I am stuck on a legacy electromagnetic link:
~$ ping voyager2.heliopause.net
PING voyager2.heliopause.net (207.46.193.254) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from (207.46.193.254): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=72877083.5 ms
64 bytes from (207.46.193.254): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=72877853 ms
64 bytes from (207.46.193.254): icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=72979083.2 ms
64 bytes from (207.46.193.254): icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=72877483.6 ms
64 bytes from (207.46
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't we know by now if we're going to ever get superluminal communication? You know, because the signal would travel back in time?
Re: (Score:2)
I just thought the numbers looked a little low ... (only seconds to Voyager2?)
it'd actually be a bit of a pain, as you'd need the distances between each hop, and I don't have SPICE [nasa.gov] installed on this machine.
MITRE should be all caps (Score:2)
MITRE (all caps) is the name of the company, not Mitre (in case someone wants to update the original post.)
in space... (Score:4, Funny)
in space, no one can hear you ping.
Also appropriate for station wagon full of tapes? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Per byte its probably still a lot cheaper than using SMS.
Interstellar networking (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
On a less serious hand, I hope the satellite IP connections are severed from the Ethernet (like electrical plants are (or should be in some cases), or hacking a satellite will be the next goal.
Re:Caching would be great here too (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Caching would be great here too (Score:5, Informative)
More information is available on the DTN Research Group's homepage: http://dtnrg.org [dtnrg.org].
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Hacking a satellite to get free TV is as bad as hacking electrical plants?
No, but I suppose hacking an old Cold War era Soviet "Weather Satellite" might be.
C'mon, you know they exist. Several hundred Hollywood movies can't all be wrong.
Re:Caching would be great here too (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point. The general idea here is to have a packet switched communications system throughout the solar system. That way if a probe is in the shadow of, say, Jupiter, it can bounce a signal off a probe orbiting Venus, which will relay the signal back to Earth.
The end result would be a more robust communications system. In the future, interplanetary communications satellites could even end up doing most of the grunt-work, thus allowing probes and manned spacecraft to carry smaller communications packages designed to work with the network rather than broadcasting in as many conditions as possible.
such a network would also be useful for astronauts on another planet or meteor. Rather than setting up a communications station, they can use orbiting satellites to relay their transmissions. (Something which NASA already does on a smaller scale with probes like the Mars rovers.)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I'd like to put a few people in space, sans suit.
Re:Caching would be great here too (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:A new area awaiting patentification (Score:5, Funny)
It has come to our attention that an earthling called Vint Cerf is making unauthorized use of our work in violation of GPTO (Galactic Patents and Trademarks Office) patent number 0932984720392837409 for Interplanetary Internet Protocol.
We demand that he must immediately cease the use and distribution of our work and that he forwards all copies and relevant documentation to us by the earliest space courier. Failure to do so will result in a lawsuit to the amount of our estimated damages of 1,008,076,123.09 galactic credits (equal to 0.0008 USD).
Very truly yours,
Aliens
P.S Greetings, Dr Mitchell
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, those Aliens have a pretty crappy economy.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Consider the effects of relativity on GPS [wikipedia.org] satellites. The time skew for a GPS satellite in low earth orbit is about 38 microseconds per 24 hour day. Thus, it isn't hard to imagine that links in an interplanetary network could operate for days without their respective clocks differing by more than a few frame lengths.
In a high-bandwidth link, the routers would probably have to adjust the transmit rates, but timestamps would be a fairly minor issue (and trivially fixed with ntp).
Re: (Score:2)
TCP wouldn't, as it's Transport (Layer 4 [wikipedia.org]). What you talk about would be either Data Link [wikipedia.org] or Physical [wikipedia.org]. (I'm going to assume Physical, as it's dealing with aspects of modulation).
As for needing to compensate for it ... yes [ieee.org]. And it's still [ieee.org] a problem. (And testing [nasa.gov] sucks, too.)