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Interplanetary Internet (IPN)
Marc Petit-Huguenin writes: "Vinton G. Cerf and others just released an Internet Draft about the Architectural Definition of the Interplanetary Internet (IPN). The first section "Desiderata of Interplanetary Internetworking" is a wonderful text." This is beautiful, both the document itself and the work put into something which, at the present time, has no practical use whatsoever. Bravo... I hope I live to see this deployed.
Actually the ISS is a good canidate for this technology. Just because someone is in orbit doesn't mean communication is easy. First off, the distances involved still add quite a bit of lag to the communction, second the window in which you can transmit before the ISS moves out of range of your antenna is quite small, so you have to really pack as much data as you can into that window, which is what this technology excells at.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
This is the same technology (SCPS gateways for instance) that is used to talk to some LEO satellites and the Space Shuttle, where you only have window of a few minutes to transmit whatever data you have.
Some of the technologies used in this are also applicable to any low bandwidth high latency connection. IP header compression is a prime example of this. Most people on Slashdot probably havn't considered the consequences of using IP over a link with a bandwidth measured in the low double digit bytes per second where return traffic may take several minutes to reach you, but people working with secure communications or low power long distance wireless links sure have.
One final thing I'm sure will interest many Slashdotters, the SCPS gateway runs on FreeBSD (and many other platforms as well, but it was developed under FreeBSD).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
From the RFC:
That's beautiful... it conveys all the important information, but yet still manages to be literate, and even a little bit inspiring.
Nice to see there are still visionaries in science.
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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
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
So, we're back to a store and forward network, eh? Can anyone say "uucp?" Perhaps I should dig out my O'Reilly books on Managing UUCP and USENET. "Paging Peter Honeyman, Dr. Peter Honeyman, please pick up the white courtesy internet phone in the lobby of the Space Hilton Hotel" Braun Brelin bbrelin@yahoo.com
Now:foo.com protested to the whole world that its servers were blackholed. /. listed the story three times, and after two years and $1.2M, foo.com was once again off the list.
Then:foo.com.cygnus.alpha was blackholed. A memorial will be held during the Month of the Space Lizard.
I've been spending quite a bit of spare time working with various grass-roots groups on lunar mission planning for the relatively near term, and one of the significant issues (out of a couple dozen) is the communications infrastructure. If you don't want to keep hogging the "Deep Space Network" of radio antennas, there is a real need for a simple and flexible standard that allows you to route information through one of a collection of geosynchronous satellites - a packet-switched protocol has some big advantages over traditional fixed circuits, and if you're going to go with packets, why not IP? So this has some real practical consequences for current planning, and I'm glad to see progress is being made.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Does this mean I will one day be able to finger Uranus? Doesn't sound too appealing...
Bush should have died, not Reagan -- Morrissey
Morrissey rides a cockhorse -- The Warlock Pinchers
Surely the Area 51 people would have figured out some better way by now?
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SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Am I the only one who is bugged by the fact that the acronym IPN is formed like "InterPlanetary interNet"? Is the word "inter" important enough to form an acronym boundary, but occasionally too trivial to get a letter into the acronym?
How about Solar System Network (SSN) instead? Then a node on an asteroid still counts, too!
Not really. Didn't you ever use a 1200/75 modem back in the day? 1200 baud down, 75 baud up.
Alternatively, ever connect to a BBS that had a sponge filter? This doesn't affect physical bandwidth, but it sure put a limit on my effective bandwidth on a number of BBSes...
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
SSN is already in use. An SSN is a nuclear powered submarine. I don't think those would work well for interplanetary networking.
Best Slashdot Co
Therefore rely not on end-to-end connectivity at any time, for the universe does not work that way.
Best Slashdot Co
A planets, its moons, and its immediate satelites can essentially be linked into one internet. IPN is only used between planets or further.
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The core developers of the internet probably have very little trouble getting full-time connections to the internet. Until the advent of DSL and cable though, many of us were stuck with dialup connections. I've longed for an SMTP-like protocol that my programs could use to talk to each other when their connection was down.
Even for "permanent" connections, this protocol is useful. Connections go down from time to time, so apps that absolutely need 100% reliability need to build in code to wait and retransmit later when the link is back up. Instead of having each app implement this in a different way, a standard store-and-forward tcp protocol could have been designed.
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Except that "farmer with shotgun causing network outages" is replaced with "Ferengi threatening IPN backbone if they're not paid soon".
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Evil Slashdot would be where the users of Evilnux, the operating system which you can be shot for not using, mock the surviving users of Good Windows. Occasionally Jon Anti-Katz posts a brilliantly-written column, loved by all its readers, in which he protests that the same people who claim to be defending immorality on the Internet actually aren't taking away enough rights, or that high school kids are having way too much of a good time.
On the Evil Internet, sending personal or informative communication using e-mail is grounds for being kicked off of your Evil ISP. Several Evil ISPs have started to install Evil Spam Filters to ensure that nothing but spam is served to their customers.
But the most prevalent thing on the Evil Internet would be the vast number of decent, moral sites showing pictures of cute puppies, hiding underground so that self-declared defenders of evil don't shut them down in the name of "harming the children".
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A second application is to a network of submarines which rarely surface, or to network nodes which are often out of communication, e.g. military back-pack radios which are used only once a day for 1 or 10 seconds, to minimize probability of detection.
They should have phrased the protocol more generally so that it takes into account all of those sorts of nets too.
I don't even think that it is that far out. Wireless, disconnected devices, and packet radio connected subnets are all examples of systems that need a similar solution. I for one would quite like to see an HTTP implementation that is hosted on a message oriented transport protocol instead of TCP. E-mail would also translate well of course, as would usenet.
HTTP would have to be modified slightly to bundle subrequests automatically (a wget protocol?) and I haven't yet read far enough to see how the draft RFC proposes establishing a route between the source and destination. If those routes change very rapidly (as for example might be true over packet radio) I can imagine some difficulty in finding a path to the destination.
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Yeah, I remember reading about IP/SMTP back when it came out. The ping times are supposed to be 30s or so, but with the IT infrastructure at my company I think they would end up being closer to five minutes or more.
In any case TCP isn't going to run well over that kind of latency, you'll just fill up the pipe with retransmit requests until the TCP connection times out.
To really make use of this kind of application you need some protocols that aren't oriented toward interactive latency. IP datagrams over avian carrier are all well and good, but at an hour per packet they had damned well better be carrying complete messages.
I could see the Palm Pilot application synchronization being done over non-interactive protocols. Store and forward messaging would work fine, and of course the web would be okay if a bit slow (over SMTP.)
So there are plenty of potential uses, the question is really whether those uses will become prevalent, or the latencies of handheld wireless devices will drop to where they are no longer needed.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
if just once we actually had a plan to implement a system before the system was needed? I expect that it will be another 10-15 years before there will actaully be much demand for this, but once we do start operating out there, its going to turn into an explosion as big as the Internet of the mid-90's.
Great, just what we needed.
/.'ed! It's not our fault!"
Some pissed off alien getting dropped from a Quake death-match and starting an interstellar war.
"But...but...Alpha Centauri got
"We told you to upgrade that node years ago. Die, Earthling!"
And, so goeth the Earth, not with a bang, but with a lag.
- Messages will be scheduled. The pigeon fanciers may not want to ship messages at oh-dark-thirty.
- Resources are very scarce. No-one owns an infinite number of birds.
- Bandwidth is limited to the paper you can tie to a pigeon's leg. Of course, technological advances might have future sysadmins sending lots of microfiche tied to its leg.
- Bundle transmission may be interrupted by a shotgun, hawk, or a pigeonne fatale.
- You need encryption to protect against pigeon impostors sending bogus messages. Or at least a child-proof cap on the message capsule.
- Every hacker on the net will want to get a pigeon packet ping going.
The only thing we didn't discuss was money. Perhaps a roll of Starbucks gift certificates tied to the other leg would work?John
John
What's nicer is that maybe in the future we will be able to slashdot whole planets :-)
I wonder if ICANN will release new top level domains for the major bodies. Imagine the rush for sex.moon.
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Our approach, which we refer to as bundling, builds a store-and-forward overlay network above the transport layers of underlying networks. Bundling uses many of the techniques of electronic mail, but is directed toward interprocess communication, and is designed to operate in environments that have very long speed-of-light delays.
Just when you think someone has figured out how to make interplanetary Quake matches possible, they tell me about store and forward...
Vinton G. Cerf and others just released an Internet Draft about the Architectural Definition of the Interplanetary Internet (IPN).
Is this the same Vint Cerf that is a member of the ICANN? The very same Vint Cerf that is discussed in this article at The Reg. Is this the same Vint Cerf who is aptly portrayed in these (part 1 and part 2) cartoons describing the actions of ICANN and their mis-handling of the Root-DNS?
If it is I suggest we steer clear of his current intentions - I wonder if he'll still be interested building a community owned/run, democratic, system with the proper 'goals'.
Vint certainly deserves accolades for his TCP/IP work, technically he's top-notch, but based on his reported actions within ICANN Im wondering if he hasnt been compromised by personal/corporate ambition.
True leaders are usually humble people - Vint sounds to be neither. I would feel a little better about this proposal if he were a more honest person.
I wonder when we'll see someone implement rfc1149 using Space Shuttle technology.
Just a quick thought:
Excuse me, miss. Can I borrow your computer? I need to ping Uranus?
**SMOCK**
Ah yes, back to the good old days of e-mail, usenet, and ftp-mail. Just imagine trying to browse the web (or even just trying to use Slashdot!) over e-mail.
I can remember back in the early '90s how my only access to a very few select newsgroups was through a gateway to Fidonet, with my BBS (which wasn't really intended for users--they would just hog the connection) dialing long distance at midnight to get the feed.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I bet it would look like an awesome dark green and white beam, demolishing all in its path...
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--hongpong.com
It is a well written document, and really, the internet as a whole was once just a bunch of hopes and dreams.
The RFC process just puts some structure around publishing those hopes and dreams
--CTH
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This might be a hell of a good place to use a really fault-tolerant and flexible architecture, like a cell matrix. That way, upgrades need not be so significantly hardware-dependent, and repairs can often be a matter of routing around damaged processors (not to mention the lesser specificity of devices means it's easier to keep spares on hand).
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Great. Soon we will be getting spammed, cybersquatted, defaced and DoS attacked from all over the solar system.
Ain't progress grand?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Which might explain why he insisted that well founded claims that China was to far away were wrong (remember: The radius of earth was had been calculated to a reasonable accuracy many centuries before Columbus). It was much easier to fund a trip to China, which after Marco Polo was famed in Europe for it's riches, than fund a trip to somewhere unknown, that most learned people would insist probably didn't even exist.
Secondly, the Portuguese were active in parts of the Northern Atlantic in the 1400's, and increasing rapidly thereafter, particularly due to several expeditions searching for a northwest passage. Now, why they would search for that in the shores around Greenland, if they at the time did not have knowledge that America likely stretched far north, is an interesting question.
There are claims concerning Columbus visiting both Greenland and Iceland.
Some claims about Portuguese activity in the North Atlantic can be found here: a message referring to claims about Portuguese slave traders, an article (in Norwegian, unfortunately) referring to theories about Columbus reaching Labrador in 1477, with subsequent Portuguese activity in the Northern regions as a result, a claim that Vatican records tells of a slaving raid in 1418, and information about a possible Portuguese expedition to Greenland around 1479, an article about possible contact between Columbus and Vikings on Iceland, based on memoirs written down by his son.
Much of this is of dubious quality, though, and I'm certainly not judging their quality, but it is an interesting theory whether correct or not.
While brining up more or less weird theories, though, there's a few people that have presented a theory that Columbus was originally Scandinavian, member of an important family with roots in royalty throughout Europe.
Decide for yourself whether to laugh at a funny story, or believe there's something in it. But either way, history from that far back isn't always as straightforward as people tend to think - there are very few parts of history from that time period that is comprehensively documented in trustworthy sources.
this is all well and good, but what about internet connections to the evil mirror universe, the one where Steve Jobs has a moustache?
they presumably, already have an evil internet up and running, but running on evil protocols. how long before we can connect with, say, evil google or - shudder - evil slashdot?
Therefore be at peace with physics...
There are too many applied computer scientists in the world, that's why I admire documents like these. So it's far fetched. Not terribly applicable to today's needs. I thought it spoke to me, in the way pure science speaks to me. When Marie Curie was discovering radium, her goals were entirely lofty, it's science, don't apply it, don't make money with it, don't win wars with it, don't launch Unreal Tournament with martians, just think about it, it's a beautiful thing. Know your limits, appreciate what you've got, admire how the universe can work for you.
Be backward compatible.
spacefem.com
Here's some interesting info about the use of laptops on the ISS but AFAIK no point of presence on the Internet for the floating condo yet...
I'm waiting to fork over my 20 million until I can get my /.!
from the draft:
3.4. Bandwidth Allocation via Market Mechanisms: "Starbucks"
I didn't realise that coffee was actually used for the protocols as well, I thought only us sysadmins needed the fix.