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."

Comments

Internet == disruption

[pestie]

Now if only someone can find a way to keep the internet from disrupting my productivity at work...

Send the comm network before sending the humans?

[LostCluster]

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...

Disruption/delay tolerant networking...

[Bobdoer]

...is all nice and fine, but disruption/delay tolerant people, those are a rarity.

Critical apps given false sense of security?

[MacFury]

A disruption tolerant internet would be great...but at what point do we allow critical applications to communicate over such a system? In reference to a recent article on VoIP 911 service...I wouldn't trust that critcal line of communication if it failed as often as my DSL connection.

Who is Half Handsome?

Re:Critical apps given false sense of security?

[LostCluster]

It's a case of matching the network technology to the application. It's the reason why we have both TCP (for when it needs to get there uncorrupted) and UDP (for when any packet that's late is now of no use) available for use under IP.

There's a big difference between a 911 call on Earth, and getting data back from Mars. Those two networks should likely have very little in common.

Re:Send the comm network before sending the humans

[mattjb0010]

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.

Re:Send the comm network before sending the humans

[ColaMan]

Nah, ya just kick a comms satellite out the door as your landing vehicle goes past aerosynchronous orbit.

hehehe

[Anonymous Coward]

January, 14, 2024:

linux 15.28

subroot@uberbox.com# ping -f www.mars.mr

http://www.slashdot.org:
January, 17, 2004 18:06 GMT

Mars Gets first DDOS

An anonymous reader writes, "It appears a group of hackers have successfully performed the first denial of service attack against Mars, taking the interplanetary internet down for several hours today. The hackers managed to mask their IPv8 addresses by rerouting through several interplanetary sublinks that initially showed them originating approxmatley 600,000 miles away from earth in the middle of space." Update 20:24GMT Yeah its a dupe again! We ran a story on this for three days in a row. It was originally posted here, here and here.

IPv8 problem

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

It was originally posted here, here and here.

I guess IPv8 links are too advanced to render in my browser.

Re:Send the comm network before sending the humans

[QuantumFTL]

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

Re:Send the comm network before sending the humans

[Helvick]

Certainly an interesting idea

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.