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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..."
They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.
News to Look Forward To:
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TSAT loses orbit, crushes Tom Cruise on eve of War Of The Worlds opening
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Air Force officer notices TSAT looks canoe-shaped before realizing contract made with wrong Grumman
Warfighters welcome their new Space Routing Overlord
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
first po
NO CARRIER
Gonna need a hell of a long patch cable...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I wonder what the ping times would be like...
(nb: I worked on some satellite internet stuff a few years ago.) If this unit is in geosynchronous orbit (so a fixed dish can always hit it), it's sitting almost 36,000 Km over the equator. Assuming your dish is at the equator a round trip is ~72,000 Km / 300,000 Km/sec (the speed of light) means the signal travels about a quarter second earth->earth not including any processing time at the satellite midway point or either end.
Trolling is a art,
Wrap it in tinfoil?
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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?!?
... but it sounds like they are putting a wood shop in orbit. I guess the need pretty bevels or something.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
They figured out how to route space! Does this route time too?
My network closet router only routes closets.
So, how are they going to keep ET from patching in to the internet for free? Did they think of that? Eh?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
...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.
Every satelite up there has to withstand "the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit". If the communications, or video or whatever got scrambled, then they wouldn't be a whole lot of use.
So what's so special about a router?
In space, noone can hear you ping.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Maybe this is a sign of things to come. As we send spacecrafts to Mars and other planets (and someday planets beyond our solar system), the InterPlanetary Internet will need such routers. A router satellite followed by routers in space and on other planets would create a nice little backbone to base our communications on. There would be one hell of a delay, but we could send our spacecrafts farther and farther away without losing the ability to communicate.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Maybe when the Hubble gets retired they can use it for one hell of a cantenna...
It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
UFOs are war flyers looking to see if earth has an open node yet.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Am I the only one who has this image of a bog standard Belkin router encased in a biscuit tin?
w.. o.. r.. r.. y.... a.. b..o..u..t....p..i.. n.. g....t.. i.. m.. e.. s....?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
is it going to use aethernet?
You misunderstood. They are developing a router which drops everything but whitespace characters.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes, but not nearly enough for a neural network complex enough to mimic the human brain when ... [this post terminated for violating the time traveler act of 2143]
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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).
(Phone Rings)
Boss: The router went down, we need you to fix it...now.
You: Fuck.
So what happens to dropped packets? Do they burn up on re-entry or go into an orbit?
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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.
... or the Matrix...
Sometimes I let slashdot fool me into thinking all the people who read/post stories/replies here are all the same kinds of geeks, like me.
It's people like you who remind me how wholly different I am from, for example, someone as shit-brained as you.
ZERO
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...
Now don't forget guys: Make sure to use WEP encryption keys and turn on your MAC filtering and change the default IP and password. And for god's sake, change the SSID from linksys to something else.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
How does that work? In the worst case the satellite appears on the horizon, which adds one Earth radius to the range. The total distance changes to about 84000 km (from 72000km in the parent post), which still leaves the propagation time at under 1/3 second.
Less is more.
Statistically, there has to be life on other planets somewhere. There is also probability that this life evolved to the point of having computers. There is a slim chance (ok maybe not a snowballs chance in hell) that they created IP networks like us. But, I promise you, if there is even a single iota of a chance that they did. My godd--ned corporate network will find a way to incorporate some Altairian ISPs slowest router as an entry in my OSPF tables. Resulting in 7 year latency. Furthermore, my users and there stupid click anywhere attitude will probably trigger an interstellar war.
You didn't catch that current technology doesn't do the routing IN space, it does it at a single point on the ground. This allows several uplinks to be used more effectively. As an example, if you make use of these vsat IP providers to connect between two remote sites, the communications would be ground->sat->ground (hub)->sat->ground, meaning the packets have to traverse twice as far as they otherwise would if routed in space.
It would just be vulnerable to space snort.
Wikileaks, no DNS
To put nice rounded edges on space cabinetry?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The Router
Here's an ISS status report that mentions it.
/sig
2 seconds? Since a TCP handshake requires 3 packets (although you can start right after you send the third packet), with a 2 second delay, that would mean 4 seconds minimum to initialize a TCP connection. Definitely not trivial.
SSL would be a bigger delay - 2 seconds for the client's settings packet to arrive at the server, 2 seconds for the server's settings and certificate to arrive at the client, 2 seconds for the master secret to get sent to the server, then (assuming that the client's confirmation isn't the holdup) 2 seconds for the server's confirmation that it will be now be using the encrypted connection, and then lastly 2 seconds for the first bit of client data to make it to the server. 10 seconds total - ouch!
Jesus: "Son of a
What would the SSID be for that bad boy?
Hmmm....redifines War Driving!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I'm not sure what the grandparent was talking about, but in the case where the sat appears on the horizon, you might not be able to get a good enough signal through that much atmosphere. Worst case, you might need to relay through a satellite that appears in (guess here) the 90 degrees of sky directly above you. This being the case, you might then take substantially longer than 1/3 of a second to get from point A to point B.
;-)
Where your original distance was a function of 2R, you're now travelling distances that are a function of 2*pi*R+2R... the other inputs are the distance between the earth's surface and the sat (X), as well as the distance between sats in radians (Y). The final formula, if you are directly below the first sat, and your target is directly below the second, 2X+YRsat (keeping in mind here that Rsat is the Rearth plus X), and that grows a bit if your sat is not, or you are relaying through a sat that is not directly above your target, of course.
Ok, that's enough of that
Of course alien networks work just like ours. Haven't you seen Independence Day?
Is that why the Internet works?
IPv4 simply routes data. Its not supposed to be secure, at least until IPSec. Usually for electromagnetic waves the layer 2 protocol provides the encryption, and everything above it works as normal. Thats the simplest and most reliable implementation. Trying to encapsulate routed packets, setting up routing rules to work with it etc gets more complex than defining one layer 2 channel, encrypting it, and letting all layer3 packets route themselves over it.
Thats Why IPSec isnt used much, except in VPNs.
Just encrypt the EM waves, like the military has since WWII. The digital data in the waves can also be encrypted as a part of the layer 2, above of which everything becomes normally routable without much configuration and the device(s) used in such communication can easily be deployed everywhere without fat manuals explaining tunnelling, IP headers, routing rules and the likes.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Well, if it's in orbit, the ping time will be around 750ms minimum, as it takes about that long for a satellite internet connection to return a ping. About 600ms to go from terrestrial to orbit and back again, + processing time and such.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
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.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
"I wonder what the ping times would be like..."
Astronomical!
[...cricket...]
Aw, c'mon, "space-hardened IP router"...astronomical? Eh, fine, you make a better joke.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.