Internet To Mars

Computerworld - The mining of asteroids, space-based hotels, zero-gravity manufacturing and medicine - they're all part of the future commercialization of space, according to a joint government and industry group that's developing the InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet.
Starting this year, with NASA funding, the IPN will roll out in pieces over the next several decades to support communications among spaceships, robots and manned and unmanned outposts in the solar system.
"It's conceivable that the IPN could go like its terrestrial counterpart, starting out as a network supporting scientific research and eventually evolving into something of commercial interest," says Vinton Cerf, senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology at WorldCom Inc.
Cerf co-invented TCP/IP in 1973 and is often called a "father of the Internet." He got the idea for an interplanetary extension of the Internet in 1997 and is now working with engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., to make it real.
"I started thinking about the past 25 years as the Internet evolved, and I thought, 'Gee, what should we be doing now so that in another 25 years, we are ready for whatever's coming?' " Cerf explained.
The protocols, software and hardware developed for the IPN will benefit terrestrial internet users, especially in mobile applications, Cerf says.
Protocols like TCP are unattractive for use in space because they're "chatty" - they depend on near-real-time exchanges between communicating parties. But a message can take 40 minutes to travel between Mars and Earth. The large distances also limit bandwidth and introduce high error rates.
"Size, weight and, most of all, power are supreme challenges for space-based communication systems, as they are for ground-based mobile systems," said the NASA-led IPN Research Group in a paper published in May.
Cerf says the IPN will be a "network of internets," in which ordinary internets are interconnected by a store-and-forward "overlay" network that forms a backbone across interplanetary space. Each internet's protocols will be terminated at its local gateway, and a new "long-haul transport" protocol will communicate between gateways. A new, end-to-end "bundle" protocol will operate above the transport layer to carry information from a gateway on Earth to one on Mars, for example.
Bundling is intended to eliminate the chattiness of local protocols. For example, a file-transfer request bundle might contain the user's password, the location of the file to retrieve and the address to which it is to be delivered.
These concepts may have applications on Earth as the terrestrial Internet becomes increasingly Balkanized, says Scott Burleigh, a senior software engineer at the JPL.
Firewalls and network address translation boxes that sit between the Internet and corporate intranets, along with the proliferation of intermittently connected mobile devices, are introducing some of the challenges of communicating in space, he says.