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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?
Having the already-in-space assets so that reliable Earth-to-Mars links can be established could be very useful to the first manned missions, especially so we could avoid losing contact in the situations where they'd otherwise have to transmit through the planet to get back to earth.
Imagine having all of Mars already be a wireless Internet hotspot before we get there...
> Now if only someone can find a way to keep the internet from disrupting my productivity at work...
Just hook in a second monitor and code a little script that starts at google news and clicks a random link every twenty seconds...
The unofficial
That's probably why NASA already have the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter scheduled for launch in 2009. This is still being spec'ed out but optical links, which are currently described as testing\Proof of concept and primary Ka-Band capabilities (once proven in MRO below) are both in plan right now.
Next year's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has significantly better telecoms relaying capability than the existing Odyssey\MGS orbiters - 6Mbits/sec using Ka-band. This goes with some major upgrades to the DSN as this currently has 10Mbit/sec limitations for telecoms at Mars distances AFAIK. This JPL presentation has lots of detail on the near term\medium term plans and proposals and where the IPN fits in. This indicates that the bandwidth of optical links to mars would be in the 30-300Mbps range.