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Vint Cerf Says No To IPv7, Yes To InterPlanetary Web
jbrodkin writes "IPv6 is here, but what's up with IPv7? Nothing, says Vint Cerf. While one day there may be another new Internet Protocol, work is not happening on it now. 'At the moment there doesn't seem to be any incentive for inventing yet another one,' he said in an interview. However, he contends that 2011 will be a Big Year for his pet project, the extraterrestrial 'InterPlanetary Internet.' The 'Bundle' network protocols will be tested in space and standardized to 'make them available to all the space-faring countries.' As they are used with more spacecraft, 'we can literally grow an interplanetary network that can support both man and robotic exploration.'"
IPv6 is not mainstream yet, and probably still won't be for a while longer. Considering that IPv6 solves the problem of limited addresses in an increasingly networked world, which was and still is the driving force for the migration from IPv4, immediate R&D into the next standard just seems unnecessary. Plus, with how big of a headache IPv6 has been, who can honestly blame 'em for not wanting to think about it for a while.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
In his novel A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge's vision of a galactic internet was basically Usenet newsgroups writ large. Once the web took off, he got a lot of flak for that seemingly outdated vision, but perhaps he's right. As easy as real-time communication is nowadays to people around the globe, once the internet moves into space, the incredible latency of long-distance communications could return us to a series of groups and threads that one logs into periodically, downloads en masse, and reads locally.
Delay / Disruption Tolerant Internet (DTN) is still at the Research Group stage. It's really more about replacing TCP than the Internet (UDP will work just fine in space), and has received some criticism (pdf download), ironically mostly centered around how it breaks the end-to-end principle.
While there is now an SIS-DTN green book (a necessary step for general deployment on space missions), and initial tests in space are positive, these things move so slowly that I think it's going to be a while before this is generally deployed in space.
I drink so much vegetable juice, IPV8
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Humans have demonstrated time and time and time again, that they are lazy and reactionary for the most part.
The transition to ipv6 is going to be absolutely huge, I'm sure everyone here doesn't need to be told about the complexities of it.
As far as I'm concerned and I feel I'm probably right, once we go to ipv6, we won't see another protocol implemented in our lifetimes (I'm in my early 30's) period, nada - not gonna happen.
The bigger the internet becomes, the older it becomes and the more devices attached, the more difficult changing the protocol is. It's already going to be a nightmare, don't expect this will get easier.
This is like one day telling all Americans "Sorry, no more 110v - we're moving to 240v power" - it's a pretty monumental task.
So to get to my point, if ipv6 doesn't do what we need or would 'like' it to do, sorry to say but tough shit, someone should have thought of that earlier, because it's going to be here to stay... - of course if you want to see a somewhat faster transition to ipvXX? then just wait until we are completely out of ipv6 addresses, we will then likely transition quicker... I'm sure they won't last long!
Speaking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's project for 'semantic web', now called 'deep linking':
Yes, I suppose inventing HTTP might qualify as a 'past success.'
Obviously it's a joke - Cerf himself has had some successes, or at least un-failures, himself, I hear.
I for one welcome our new InterPlanetary Internet overlords.
Am I really going to click the Post button on this one? Ugh!
Plant a tree in a developing country.
You mean LSN?