“Hello World” for the interplanetary Internet
Space, final network frontier: the Disruption-Tolerant Networking protocol (DTN, previously known as Delay Tolerant Networking) has sent out its first wails the last weeks when the NASA engineers have tested the first interplanetary-class network communication. It’s an historic step that opens novel opportunities to communicate in space, remote-control probes and eventually to liaise with the future human outposts in the Solar System.
“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet” team lead and manager of the new networking architecture Adrian Hooke has stated commenting on trials end at NASA headquarters in Washington. DTN is the result of 10 years of joined efforts by the USA space agency and Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol at the base of the “terrestrial” Internet and current Google Chief Internet Evangelist who has once again impressed his mark on what should become the elemental building block of the future space communications.
The new protocol has been created to adequately respond to the challenges posed by the information exchange within an “hostile” environment like the outer space, or better still the space between the planets of Solar System, where before being delivered to destination a data packet must face any sort of troubles, delays, obstacles, disconnections and the maximum speed at which light can travel (300.000 km/sec.). A spaceship or a satellite can in any given moment be behind a planet, unavailable to the network, solar storms can disrupt communications and the average times for a cross talk between Earth and Mars take up to 20 minutes in the better case.
To remedy the limitations and the potential issues that interplanetary communications will have to deal with, DTN has been designed to not to take for granted the availability of an end-to-end connection instantly reachable in its entirety. Contrariwise to what happens here on Earth, in space any node of the network will keep the data to send until it will be sure to have delivered it to the next ring in the chain. Such an approach allows to face and overcome both the possible obstacles on the connection path and the huge distances to cover.
Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN operations at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has highlighted how the finalization of the standard for the interplanetary Internet will allow to give up the “custom” approach used in space missions nowadays, an approach for which “an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it“.
“With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically” Torgerson has said, and it seems to listen to one of those pioneers of the Seventies evoking the advent of Arpanet as a tool that soon would have revolutionised communications between American research centers and universities. The first actual links based on the new protocol have been tested within a month starting from October, and the researchers have used the giant Deep Space Network antennas as transmitters activating them two times a week.
More than a simple “Hello World”, anyway, the first DTN link has sent back and forth through space a series of images (space images, of course) until reaching the Epoxi probe, covering over 32,000 millions of kilometers. Epoxi is currently used by NASA as a Mars data-relay orbiter, and it’s on a mission to encounter Comet Hartley 2 within two years.
The DTN network is currently made up by 10 nodes: the first, the “outer” one is the above said Epoxi probe, while the other nines are the DSN mega-antennas here on Earth. Determined that the new protocol works, now what is needed is to further improve it to make it suitable for the next scheduled space missions. A new round of trials is currently scheduled for the next summer, when the software will be tested aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
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