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Already being worked on: http://www.ipnsig.org/home.htm

Of course space is a series of tubes too. How else do you think we got Interplanetary Internet on the ISS?

Well, according to the "Font of all (quick) wisdom", the "official" name for this is IntetPlaNet which is backed in part by the (wait for it) InterPlanetary Internet SIG (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

Sadly it just defines the DTN architecture and is much less enjoyable than rfc2549 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service).

I would be willing to live in another planet as a hermit and occassionaly contact Earth via InterPlaNet to learn news and buy food that I couldn't grow myself or shiny laptops that I couldn't manufacture alone (what else would I do in space if I couldn't play with GNU/Linux?). Believe me, the lack of a 24-hour day would be the least important of my difficulties. The major difficulty is the lack of the tri-billions of euros that I would need to escape from the Earth's gravity, transporting my hermit colony on a nice planet part-by-part, assembling it, and getting enough water, food, and fuel resources with me to live as a free man. Give me the tri-billion euros I would need or give me a hermit's life on a planet for free as a gift, and I will go in any suitably temperate planet no matter their orbit, even if they have an 1-hour day or a 7000-day year.

It is clear from the article that they are aiming for something more than OSPF or other link state routing protocols. If a link is cut inside a network, OSPF adjusts so that traffic is routed through alternative paths. But, until there is convergence (which is quite fast in most cases), packets may be lost. Packet drops do tend to occur if a router cannot find a suitable route to a destination, if it is able to find a route but the link to that route is down, or even if the queue on that link is congested (full). That's the very nature of our present best effort internet.

It appears to me that these guys try to address some of these "shortcomings" by making certain privisions that can guarantee packet delivery, even in a overly late fashion. A routing instability, lost routes or links should not be able to cause packet drops if they have it right.

However, I used the quotes in "shortcomings" because I am not entirely certain that this has not been tried before. If, instead of a best effort packet routing service, you try to invent a "smart" network layer that can guarantee stuff like ordered delivery (packets are delivered in the order they departed), assured delivery (even with great delays) etc, you are basically trying to invent a (gasp!) connection oriented service. Not that connection oriented technologies are inherently bad, but, well, they are certainly an order of magnitude harder to implement. Anyone remembers OSI? It might as well be easier to leave IP simple as it is and try to move some smartness to the upper layers.

Additionally, it would be better to try to build on top of unreliable services like IP and construct stuff like SMTP (as a previous poster very cleverly pointed out), that can function even if parts of the network are mulfunctioning.

Well, anyway, you might want also to take a look at the efforts on the interplanetary internet, this article reminded me of it.

Don't limit yourself to earth ... the solar system is a very big place. Earth is rather puny in comparison. The InterPlanetary Internet http://www.ipnsig.org/ SIG is working through issues on expanding the Internet outward [latency, anyone?] ... and who knows? maybe in 100 years we'll have millions of robotic explorers and harvesters out there, all connected to one big network, and each having dozens or hundreds of components requiring an IP address each. Having a system in place now saves us from many, many, many firmware updates. Slashdot headlines, Jan 31, 2106 Deep space probe thought to discover alien "trash" Direct IPv6 Link to probe's 'real-time' camera 42,000nd comment: Light speed is too slow ... but after 18 hours of staring at the screen waiting for the picture to come in, all I see is a flying toilet. 42,001st comment: Hmmm ... try blinking to turn off your screen saver. You'll then see it's a Coca-Cola bottle. next 20,000 comments: ... the probe has been slashdotted! ... and one that says: man, those alien-space-deities must be crazy.

Well, at least there's a research group out there working on it. http://www.ipnsig.org/

Maybe this is a sign of things to come. As we send spacecrafts to Mars and other planets (and someday planets beyond our solar system), the InterPlanetary Internet will need such routers. A router satellite followed by routers in space and on other planets would create a nice little backbone to base our communications on. There would be one hell of a delay, but we could send our spacecrafts farther and farther away without losing the ability to communicate.

See:
http://www.ipnsig.org/home.htm

Chip H.

I went to an interesting seminar where Vint Cerf was speaking, and one of his passions is the Interplanetary Network. There are some big problems to overcome when you're thinking that packets will take years to arrive.
Anyway, lots of the nameservers and mailservers that I use are already running v6. When will Slashdot do it, being the pioneering geek site that it is?

Routers in space will be the first steps towards an interplanetary internet. The folks at CCSDS (Consultive Committee for Space Data Systems) have been working on an interplanetary internet specification for a while now. Some additional technical details and other information is also available. Very interesting stuff.

Routers in space will be the first steps towards an interplanetary internet. The folks at CCSDS (Consultive Committee for Space Data Systems) have been working on an interplanetary internet specification for a while now. Some additional technical details and other information is also available. Very interesting stuff.

Routers in space will be the first steps towards an interplanetary internet. The folks at CCSDS (Consultive Committee for Space Data Systems) have been working on an interplanetary internet specification for a while now. Some additional technical details and other information is also available. Very interesting stuff.

Some interesting articles about DTN that were made available on the IPNSIG (Interplanetary Network Special Interest Group) site:

DTN Tutorial (PDF)

DTN Architecture: The Evolving Interplantary Internet (TXT)

DTN for Extreme Environments (PDF)

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Some interesting articles about DTN that were made available on the IPNSIG (Interplanetary Network Special Interest Group) site:

DTN Tutorial (PDF)

DTN Architecture: The Evolving Interplantary Internet (TXT)

DTN for Extreme Environments (PDF)

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Some interesting articles about DTN that were made available on the IPNSIG (Interplanetary Network Special Interest Group) site:

DTN Tutorial (PDF)

DTN Architecture: The Evolving Interplantary Internet (TXT)

DTN for Extreme Environments (PDF)

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I was surprised to see no mention of Vint Cerf's InterPlaNetary Internet Project.

Interplanetary IP protocol

Chip H.

Woah, that link is interesting - in the faq that they are planning a satelite system around mars.

Well, there's always the Interplanetary Internet.

I wasn't the lecture I saw, but I just found a slide on the IPN website that shows their domain naming convention. From what I gather the planet/star combo is dropped for intraplanetary comms and only added when doing interplanetary comms.

Page 25 of the following PDF:
http://www.ipnsig.org/reports/ISART9-2000.pdf

Alive and well, with domains *.mr for Mars. See Astrobiology Magazine and the main project page IPN

It's OK, all that'll happen is that 20 years later, Emporer Bush III will invade the Jovian moons, claiming the Jovian WMD program presents a clear and present danger to the United States of Earth. "We know where they are. They are in the area around Ganymede and Callisto," states Rumsfeld Jr(1), sweeping aside accusations that the nucular(2) materials were originally dumped there by the government itself, and countering with an attack on the "Old Europans". Immediately, hardware manufacturers across the planet rename IO ports "Freedom Ports" in a gesture of patriotism and support for "our boys in Jove". Noam Chomsky, in a statement smuggled out of Guantanamo Bay by underground "extremists", points out "our boys and girls are actually sitting at home in Wisconsin, playing Full Spectrum Warrior on the Playstation 5 with the signals relayed via ssh tunnel across the InterPlaNet to our new 'Xenophobe'-class attack drones" and is summarily executed for recklessly endangering the high scores of troops in a time of war. Damn terrorist.

(1) successor to his father's role as Defense Secretary
(2) the official spelling as laid out in the 2008 Project for the New American Dictionary

Actually, there's a _real_ project that is designing a system to give the equivalent of IP addresses to spacecraft on/around other planets. Check out InterPlanNet for more details. And no, it's not IP based.

Even if the entire constellation is destroyed it would result in an outage of no more than a day given the resources that would become available in the aftermath.

Dude... you mean if they take out the Milky Way, you're back up in one day flat? Damn... I know they were working on that Interplanetary Internet thingy, but wow! You Verisign people kick ass! I used to work at Akamai, and we weren't half that distributed (or smart!).

Oh wait a minute, the Milky Way is a galaxy... /me wonders what constellation you're talking about... what constellation are we in, anyway?

Somebody pointed out that this may not be practical for electronics because of the overhead needed to sync the two signals. It seems like the most practical use would be in communicating over extremely long distances. Your overhead would be made up in the time you save transmitting the signal. If you could do this, somehow, without the cable, it could reduce lag time between, say, earth and mars.

http://www.ipnsig.org/ has some interesting content if you're curious about how a network might work between "internets" on Mars and Earth. A squid proxy is probably a good solution on the Mars side, but you'll probably have to set up site "subscriptions" to keep the proxy up to date in a push fashion, or be prepared to wait an hour or more to queue a request for a web page "special delivery"-style. Bandwidth is precious!

This project is probably one of the most interesting ones I've ever come across.

http://www.ipnsig.org/

Some fascinating reading there. The problems that have to be solved are really quite interesting. For one thing, you can forget about TCP.

They never said anything about compression. Their technology is all about eliminating the throttling effect of TCP acknowledgements on a long haul high-bandwidth link. You can only grow TCP windows so large, and with TCP slow-start, only so fast.

I once saw an article on using TCP for interplanetary work, and they showed that RTT was the bandwidth limiter (bigtime!) due to how the protocol is constructed.

These "Fountain" guys are not about compression. They're about sending XOR blocks to fill in gaps, doing essentially blind-retransmits until the other end says "Ok, I got it all now!" Ick. The XORing bit just apparently helps reduce the number of needed "proactive retransmits."

Readers may be interested in the CCSDS (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) homepage which has many protocols, proposals, and drafts available for public review. Take for example their file transfer protocol (PDF - start reading on page 20) that already "bundles" data and looks to be somewhat comprehensively thought out.

Food for thought; these principles have not only been conceived before, but reduced to standards (and implementation).

David E. Weekly

Mars Network

http://www.ipnsig.org/