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posted by mrpg on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the IP-via-alien-carrier dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

NASA's Human Exploration and Operations and Science Mission Directorates are collaborating to make interplanetary Internet a reality.

They're about to demonstrate Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, or DTN -- a technology that sends information much the same way as the conventional Internet does. Information is put into DTN bundles, which are sent through space and ground networks to its destination.

The Science Mission Directorate looks forward to incorporating DTN into future missions and has identified the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, mission as the first key opportunity to demonstrate this revolutionary capability.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday July 17 2018, @12:42PM (1 child)

    by Zinho (759) on Tuesday July 17 2018, @12:42PM (#708300)

    Sounds a lot like the satellite internet connection I had for a month before cancelling. I literally had ping times of up to 3500ms, and if I turned on my VPN I couldn't even do file transfers across the network in Windows. Somewhere along the line the OSI model broke down, and something in the Host layers balked at the connection provided in the media layers by my ISP.

    If interplanetary internet is going to succeed it'll need more support than just a replacement of the network layer.

    --
    "Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday July 17 2018, @01:09PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 17 2018, @01:09PM (#708311) Journal

    If interplanetary internet is going to succeed it'll need more support than just a replacement of the network layer.

    To be fair, the network layer has some problems that make things that should work great, not work.

    For example, "mostly reliable" or semi-reliable wireless connections should be able to retransmit lost packets through drop-outs just as dial-up modems were able to retransmit packets through line noise. But they often don't; the packets get dropped.

    When we take this semi-reliable wireless connection and move the ends to different planets, now we have the problem of a pretty high inherent ping time due to the speed of light* on top of the problem of the wireless connection being intermittent.

    Thing is, these are easily predictable problems that should be very easy to solve.

    Takes a long time to transmit? Wait longer. Done. Maybe not 100% solution, but something workable until that 100% solution comes along.
    Many packets get lost? Acknowledge them, retransmit lost ones. Done. Maybe not 100% solution, but something workable until that 100% solution comes along.

    But wifi shooting a few tens of meters across the street becomes basically unusable if a few trucks go by and modulate the signal between the buildings. Something will definitely need to change.

    -----
    * unless they get that entanglement thing working and create an ansible, and hand-wave away criticisms that it would break causality, which frankly doesn't seem to be a thing at the quantum level (still does not solve dropped packets).