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Interplanetary Internet protocol in devel
shadowlight1 writes "This MaximumPCMag article discusses NASA's current research into interplanetary protocols for Internet data. The research team includes one of the inventor of TCP/IP. Get ready to ping-flood Pluto.
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It certainly gives a whole new meaning to "Fingering Uranus."
1 moon.earth.sol.mw (34.21.56) 500.263 ms 601.991 ms 541.324 ms
2 mars.sol.mw (34.25.5) 180400.005 ms 185394.558 ms *
3 jupiter.sol.mw (54.2.3) 3600530.348 ms 3601001.451 ms 3602219.045 ms
4 pluto.sol.mw (68.3.4) 604803040.079 ms 604804356.086 ms *
Maybe we don't have to deal with planetary lag, after all. Or maybe I've just read Ender's Game one too many times.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I bet Stef still couldn't win a Quake game against them, though.
Seriously, though, the time delay makes TCP-style communication silly, and if you're using UDP the lag becomes irrelevent (except in Netrek! :).
It seems bizare that they'd need to invent a new protocol for this when protocols which would function perfectly well already exist.
(Or are they trying to score geek-points?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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Now we'll have some really cool excuses for servers being down...
;)
Sorry, our planet was eclipsed.
Damn rocks got in the way of the packets I tells ya!
Ooops, wrong moon
Routing a call to a speeding BMW is not the same as getting data to astronauts. The problem with getting a call to a vehicle is that the position is changing and coverage is limited due to terrain. The problems described in getting data to planetary locations is propagation delay.
Transmit and acknowledgement can work in space, you just need larger timeout values, much larger. The article states that connection-based links are impossible. "Connections" are a state of mind, so to speak. You could achieve connections, they would just be very high latentcy. And things like forward error correction can minimize data loss on high noise radio links.
"Off-the-shelf" technology and know-how should be able to solve the problems described in this article rather quickly.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Im thinking the protocol or method would be more similar to UUCP for the exchange of data than TCP/IP. Will kibo gain more followers? I think so.
Bandwidth to Pluto isn't neccesarily going to be all that bad. Latency is what's going to suck. If it takes you 30 seconds to get a packet from point A to point B... that tells you nothing at all about the bandwidth. This is nonintuitive to some people. A common saying back when usenet was done via UUCP instead of TCP/IP was "it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tapes". A station wagon full of media has a *tremendous* bandwidth, but really poor latency and a huge "packet size". UUCP is actually more suited to interplanetary communications than TCP/IP is. Luckily, we've got some great tools for getting UUCP networks and TCP/IP networks to play together nicely -- mail and news will work without a hitch over UUCP, even today. And MX records mean never having to say "I hate bang paths".
See : http://www.research.ibm.com/ quantuminfo/teleportation/
We will have "ansibles", ala Ender's Game, eventually. And it will be quite cool!
--
"All that is visible must grow and extend itself into the realm of the invisible."
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
Sigh... we need more military people in /.
Space Communications Protocol, what the author must have been talking about, first of all, is being headed by MITRE (the strap-on brain of DoD back east to help them with anything geek).
The main goal is to delelop a protocol that looks and feels to the user like TCP/IP, but handles the fact that the major reason for packet loss being.. well, lost or damaged packets, literally, out into space.
TCP/IP assumes that lostpackets are because of network congestion, and so a missing packet is requested to be retransmitted.. and this usualy does the trick.. since most terra-nets run on fiber or copper...
If you kept asking for retransmissions in space - you exasserbate the problem so that if the errors grow to only 10^-6, and you use plain ol TCP/IP, the overhead and loss drowns the network out.. and you get nothing.
10^-6 errors can be a good day around here in the space biz... so one of the major points of SCPS is to deal with high BERs differently than TCP/IP, the other, of course, is security (how can you get spy sat data to the ground and beam it with an RF signal that anyone can pick up?)
SCPS has standard ftp, and will encorporate http eventually.. but its not done yet AFAIK.
You can read all about it here...
http://bongo.jpl.nasa.gov/scps
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
This is a bit of old news, Vint Cerf has been working on this for more than a year now. He is acting now in advance of bad decisions expected by the ICANNt and NSI. There has been a fight going on for years over expanding the TLDs from the current 227 to thousands, millions, or an unlimited number.
.earth, and there were several hundred machines on the internet which used .earth with a physical location for a hostname (leuven.earth, london.earth, ougadougou.earth :-) Sendmail on those hosts believed the fake RNSs added to the bind root.hints file, and the whole thing worked quite nicely from 1989 until 1997. Then Vint asked our group to stop using .earth so he could plan on using it as a new TLD as part of an interplanetary addressing scheme.
.earth as a TLD, and the gateways sending messages between the earth domain and the space domain. Could get very rich that way :-)
Then I could be anti@cypher, and my mail would get to me, and you could eyeball my webpage http://www.anti.cypher and so on.
For years I ran a shadow TLD of
There are several projects going on at the same time for this "interplanetary internet" (exonet?, xenonet?). Vint Cerf and company are working on an extensible naming scheme for planets, moons, orbits, asteroids and ships in transit.
There is another group working on reliable transmission protocols and routing protocols to deal with huge round trip times and extremely expensive transmission costs. Just ACKing a transmission is not going to cut it, the ACKs need to be piggybacked on transmissions going the other way, and the state machine to keep track of it all will be huge.
There is a group at Caltech working on the low level transmission characteristics (layer 1 stuff) with a large amount of redundancy. Cyclical and longitudinal redundancy woven into the bitstream, multi-frequency phase encoding, all the coolest tech for RF fanatics.
When all this stuff comes together there will be at least one ISS and possibly some private orbital stations. Expect some privately funded space exploration missions as soon as it becomes possible for a corporation to buy some cheap boost to LEO and from there they will start to explore in the hopes of finding something to make their stockholders very rich. I've been predicting for years that cheap space missions will be the next "revolution" to replace all the hype around the internet.
I still want to control
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
A long long time back I worked for *cough*M$ for a while. JUST 6 MONTHS THOUGH!
:o)
Anyways I had this silly idea then and I emailed it to our friend BG.
I figured if you put a mirror on the moon you could store data in a 'light loop' by shinning a laser at it and turning it on and off (real quickly). Turned out you could actually store quite a bit of data (for that time) in such a loop with a pretty low latency.
So of course clouds would be an issue, and I suggested that two satelites would be easier to deal with. Just beam up your data and keep it in a laser loop between the satelites.
Well, I never got a response from Billy Boy, but sure enough, about a year later he announced his satelite launching plans.
Breace.
From a common quote file:
:-)
a um.html :-( check the babyl archives.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"
--Andrew Tanenbaum
I've lived this quote several times
This quote is relevent to linux users because it originated during some discussions between AST and Linus Torvalds. See:
http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/Linus_vs_Tanenb
although I no longer find the quote there
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Sorry if you got the impression I truly wanted to make money off of something that should always be free. I have the greatest respect for Jon Postel and all the amazing works he accomplished.
.earth domain, and although it wasn't official, it was fun to play with and use for training and playing. Vint Cerf is now working on a couple of projects to expand addressing and routing to the vagaries of space. All of this started a couple of years ago when NASA sent a web server up with the shuttle into orbit, and a new TLD .orb was created for the occasion. It was fun probing around the Root Name Servers to see the delegation to a NASA gateway, and for a short while it allowed zone transfers of the handful of records that existed.
.orb has gone away, and there is a working group trying to protect some of the future space naming schemes. Given the various attempts by various organisations to control the TLDs and naming in general, Jon Postel and now the people he inspired are working hard to keep future naming schemes open and available for everyone, not just a greedy corporate controlled WIPO or ICANNt.
For years there was a
Now
Sorry for the misunderstanding
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
When it absolutely, positively, has to be lost at the speed of light interplanetary tcp/ip!
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Um, nothing about this research has to do with superluminal transport of information in a useful manner. Although EPR nonlocality (the phenomenon this research takes advantage of, IIRC) does give you 'instantaneous' action-at-a-distance, it does so in such a way that information *cannot* be transmitted; the 'receiving end' can't even tell when the action has 'occurred' until the 'senders' *tell* them.
-spc
Anyways, their servers are busy with intergaslactic.distributed.net's project to crack the message in Pi.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Anyways, their servers are busy with intergalactic.distributed.net's project to crack the message in Pi.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oh, ok -- I can't get xDSL service in my sorry little apartment, but people on other PLANETS get connected all day. That's real fair. Maybe I should just move to outer space, huh?
:) */
/* Prediction -- first response to this post will say "Yes, you should. Please."
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.