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Building the Interplanetary Internet

Posted by kdawson on from the ping-and-wait dept.

sighted writes "Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, now a Google VP, is leading a NASA effort to create a permanent network link to Mars within the next two years. As Cerf outlined in a recent talk, the 'InterPlaNet' protocol is designed to handle the delay caused by interplanetary distances. A signal traveling between the Earth and Mars can take up to 20 minutes."

4 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ping by Steve+Cox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the presentation on IPN I saw a few years back, it appears that you wont be pinging marsbase.com..... they actually fancy adding a couple of levels to get some real TLDs.....

    ping marsbase.com.mars.sol

    When I saw the .sol in the presentation I was pretty impressed... theres a little bit of future proofing in that one....

    Steve.

  2. Re:Ping by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ping marsbase.com.mars.sol.milky
    Now it's really future-proof

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  3. What a fun project! by FuzzyDaddy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I had a friend who was doing some consulting for a company that wanted to offer satellite based internet connectivity. When they first tried out the system, things took forever to download, despite the fact they had many Meg of bandwidth. Each picture that loaded involved a separate TCP/IP connection, which takes several back and forth messages to establish - which was sluggish because of the latency going to the geosynchronous satellite. (This was several years ago, and all the vendors have very sophisticated understanding of the issues).

    With a twenty minute delay, the standard practice of resending dropped packets becomes more prohibitive (the send/NAK/resend would take an hour!), so you'd have to make the encoding redundant enough so that most errors could be recovered by the receiver - without doubling the bandwidth. Oh, it would be fun!

    Ok, I'll go back to writing documentation now. >sigh

    --
    It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
  4. talking without delays using quantum entanglement by PermanentMarker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just an idea why not used entangled atoms to bypass this distant problem?.
    As far as i know there is no limit on distance, changes in one atom happens at the same time on the other atom altough they are on different locations. Thats a quantum physic property

    But i'm not sure if information can be passed trough this method (wel hack thats worth investigation)

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