Slashdot Mirror
Vint Cerf's Disruption-Tolerant Networking
An anonymous reader writes "Net pioneer, Vint Cerf, talked this week about the space internet (the Interplanetary
Internet), and an interesting 1994 April Fool's email he
penned as a Request for Comment [1607]. The thread involves a reverse time
capsule from the year 2023, but covers Cerf's side interests in Shakespeare.
Since 2004 marks the 30th anniversary of publication of the first paper
on the Internet, his views on the future
of the net and Interplanetary
Internet seem to have morphed somewhat into delay and disruption tolerant
networking because of high demand for videoconferencing, Voice-Over IP, and multimedia."
This brings up an interesting step in the path towards trying to settle Mars... would it be a smart idea to have communciations satellites orbiting Mars before we send the first humans?
The current set of satellites provide communication links between the landers and Earth.
This brings up an interesting step in the path towards trying to settle Mars... would it be a smart idea to have communciations satellites orbiting Mars before we send the first humans?
The current set of satellites provide communication links between the landers and Earth.
Yes, however it's clear that the limited bandwidth provided by those satalites is not nearly as much as one would wish for an entire human settlement to have to share.
Also it would be smart to have 100% dedicated communications satallites so that there would be less chance of something unrelated to communications causing a problem on the satallite.
Don't get me wrong, the satallites have been great (I work on MER) however we still have to throw away observations due to bandwidth constraint, and we have to wait quite a bit to get data back, on the order of several hours... not an ideal situation!
Maybe a few optical links with a radio backup would do the trick.
Cheers,
Justin