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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 Fishscene on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:44AM

    by Fishscene (4361) on Wednesday July 18 2018, @01:44AM (#708612)

    I've been researching DTN for a few months now. There seems to be 2 major categories for Delay/Disruption(both/either name can be used) Tolerant Networking.
    1) The route through the network is unknown. If you need to get a message from one-side of the stadium to your friend on the other side, and you have 0 infrastructure other than random cell phones, how would the routing algorithm's route efficiently to and from your destination?
    2) The route through the network is known. This is what NASA gets to work with because they know which satellites are being used. It also helps to know when the satellites will be available as they orbit celestial bodies.

    Whereas TCP and UDP require a nearly real-time connection between the source and destination, DTN does not.

    Basically, DTN comes somewhere after the ISO Application layer, and before the 3rd layer. DTN is ideally protocol-agnostic. So it should be able to use TCP/UDP/BlueTooth/Radio/anything and it should be able to be completely independent of the protocol. So if it gets something over bluetooth, it can route it over TCP or whatever other protocol you have for communicating between 2 devices.

    I for one am very excited to see NASA moving ahead with this.

    Here's some resources on the topic:
    https://www.nasa.gov/content/dtn [nasa.gov] This has a video that does an excellent, if basic job at describing how DTN will help with efficient communication.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr5A2WQGzIQ [youtube.com]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking [wikipedia.org]

    /Begin dream
    I've had aspirations for creating an easy-to-use DTN app for Android/iPhone that could be used in emergency situations when infrastructure is not available. For example, some guy in a boat paddling down a flooded street and hapless victims enabling an emergency mode - transmitting their location and status info to the boat man who can being the info to an emergency center. Or even for use with villages that don't have infrastructure - they can send messages across town using a completely ad-hoc DTN network.
    I'm also not a programmer either - that's probably my biggest hurdle right now. So I've been dinking around in Powershell learning more about DTN and how I might code it in the future.
    Here's the project I've been following - and they have a working DTN app for Android: https://github.com/ibrdtn/ [github.com]
    /end dream

    --
    I know I am not God, because every time I pray to Him, it's because I'm not perfect and thankful for what He's done.
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