US Air Force Building Space Router

Saint Aardvark writes "From the ISTS daily news comes a story on the US Air Force seeking to build a space router. From TFA: "Northrop Grumman and Caspian Networks are collaborating to develop an Internet Protocol router that can withstand the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit. The space-hardened IP router will be part of the Air Force's Transformational Satellite Communications System, which will provide IP-based communications to warfighters." I wonder what the ping times would be like..."

Comments

About Freaking Time

[Emugamer]

Okay this wasn't exactly the use that I had thought of an IP based communications grid and I for sure am not the most knowlegeable on the subject of radio communication arrays used by NASA et al but isn't it time that we have a formalized "cell" network in space to best aquire signals from microsats and such? reduce the cost of individual launchs by already having everything up there that you need to communicate with and then just move forwards with less communication equipment and more mission core equipment?

can someone who knows more about this tell me why this hasn't been done?!?

Live at the end of a sat uplink....

[C. Alan]

...Sucks.

I have direcway, it was either that or dial-up because I live in the boonies of the tehachapi mountains in California. The lags are terrible, on the order to 2 seconds or more. Plus, when it snows, I have to clear the dish of snow to get online. Download rates are OK, but uploads are on the order of a 56k modem.

Re:Live at the end of a sat uplink....

[xuttah]

Umm...DirecWay is a consumer project with consumer-level reliability. While I prefer not to work with satellites, some carriers (VSAT, for one), have business-class operations that allow bidirectional high-speed bandwidth with latencies of about 600ms. That's high, yes, but not 2 seconds. And given that the Air Force may be putting more than $120/month into this deal, I'm guessing their performance (not latency, necessarily) could be higher.

Re:Ping times.

[Brett Buck]

It's surprising how long that ~1/2 a second can be. I've had conversations over a geo comsat, and it's pretty awkward - just long enough to screw up the flow, but not so long that you have to consciously compensate for it.

NASA is already doing this with CISCO

[alphakappa]

From an April 2004 news report. There is an interesting quote there:

"..isco does not expect to develop a business selling space hardware, and estimated that the market for satellite-based Internet routers may be only 15 or 20 units over the next decade. Instead, Cisco's plans are focused on the ground-systems business that could be created if satellites are able to communicate using Internet protocols. With Internet-based communications, laptop computers and personal digital assistants could become de facto satellite ground stations."

Re:universal IP network

[alphakappa]

More from Vincent Cerf on creating an interplanetary IP network.

OT: Warfighter

[Dr. Cody]

Can somebody explain why I have never seen anyone enraged by this word's existance? Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, but I have never seen anyone proclaim that "warfighter" is a blatant example of Newspeak or a shameless parody of L. Ron Hubbard's knack for descriptive writing.

Has this word been around for a while? I can't recall hearing it before the advent of warblogging. If anything, it seems like a step in the wrong direction, for being a euphemism, and all (if at all).

Re:Ping Times

[Rei]

I'm surprised they're using IP. At least, IPv4 is rather insecure; I don't know too much about IPv6. Are they using static arp entries? Otherwise, they'll be seriously vulnerable to arp hijacking, DoS, etc. I'd be interested in the details of how they plan to get such a system to work.

why this is important

[kvnflynn]

Currently almost all military satellite communications are point-to-point in nature. most of the time this is done by converting IP traffic to serial data before sending over the modems and satellite. this causes ip traffic to be routed back to a core facility before heading on to its final destination. being able to route IP in the sky would provide better mobile-to-mobile communications with less overhead and more dynamic in nature... both reducing delay and bandwidth.

Re:If your'e not underneath it

[Umrick]

Not insightful.

Direcway satellite. I'm in MD hitting a geosync satellite for my Internet. Average ping time is ~750ms to most sites. Nowhere near "3.75-4 seconds"

Note this is bi-directional... It's not cheating by sending a land signal out and getting returns by satellite.

And yes if you're interested, World of Warcraft runs just fine...

Re:How to harden a router.

[e2ka]

Perhaps they could learn from electronics used in particle physics experiments, which are operating in very high radiation environments (higher than space? I would guess so.) In many cases custom electronics are made where a commercial solution would be much cheaper, but just won't operate in that environment.

One thing I have overheard while working for a CERN LHC experiment is that the smaller chip fabrication processes are more rad-hard. (More resilient to single-event upset)

The way our military works

[kurt555gs]

The router will support Gopher as it's main protocol.

Why are all things the US government does always so far behind comercial development?

Oh well , it's just the way it is.