Interplanetary Internet Bibliography
From N4C
Vint Cerf is rightly credited with being one of the 'Fathers of the Internet' and he has continued his nurturing by joining the Technical Advisary Board of N4C. Like many a proud father whose offspring are in the process of fleeing the nest, back in 1994 Vint Cerf began to muse on where 'his' creation might get to in the future. What started a slightly whimsical 'denkstuck' published as one of the RFC Series 1st April documents became a concrete research project in 1998 working with NASA and others to investigate the problems of extending the, by then, burgeoning terrestrial Internet into wilder reaches of the solar system. So came into being the Interplanetary Internet. The Interplanetary Internet project has developed through architectural and basic protocol work into what is now (2009) the beginnings of a space tested, production system that can be realistically considered as the basis for spacecraft communication in the future.
The early history of the Interplanetary Internet was explained by Vint in an interview that he gave to Astrobiology Magazine in 2004.
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Contents |
Pre-History: An April Fool's Confection
The RFC Editor annually selects a humorous or zany document to be published on 1st April (Just in case you really don't know about April Fools' day, Wikipaedia will explain all). Vint Cerf authored the 1994 specimen: A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY. In the process he projected the nascent Internet into orbit and out to the planets.
Early History
According to Vint Cerf's interview mentioned in the Introduction, he hadn't really tied the April Fool's piece to his 'late 1997 awakening to the possibility of an Interplanetary Internet'. Doubtless in the way of the human mind, his subconscious was mulling this over,and in 1997 he began speaking about the challenges of building an Interplanetary Internet. He was introduced to Adrian Hooke, a NASA engineer who is a leading advocate of space communications standards (as opposed to the sort of ad hoc, country specific, mechanisms that are mostly used). Adrian and a small team were already working on how to adapt TCP/IP to the challenges of the space environment - especially the long delays - and together they organized a project at NASA which is still going on. The initial public announcement of this project can be found in the JPL house journal Universe (7 August 1998).
Aside: When the Interplanetary Internet project started, Vint was working for MCI and the usual reference that is cited about the 'birth' of the Interplanetary Internet is to an article in what would probably now be described as Vint's blog on the MCI web site called Cerf's Up. Regrettably, since Vint left MCI and it was taken over by Verizon, these articles seem to have disappeared from the internet. This is a shame and it would be good if they could be resurrected. It took a deal of ferreting to find the Universe article - the search engines mostly refer to the other front page article relating to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster!
Architectural Developments
Over the next three years the DARPA IPN project involved a large number of (US) organizations centred around JPL but involving Mitre, GST, Sparta, and several universities. During this period the IPN research group was set up by the internet Research Task Force and the Internet Society (ISOC - where Vint Cerf was Chairman during this period) created the IPN Special Interest group (IPNSIG).
The IPNSIG web site still exists although it appears to have been inactive since about 2004 and there is no linkage to the site from the ISOC main site (Stephen Farrell, TCD was the last recorded chair of the IPNSIG back in 2003). The web site also contains a reports repository which does not seem to be connected to the pages linked from the home page. This repository and the publications page contains some interesting archival material from the early days of development of the IPN.
The main output of this phase was the DARPA report Interplanetary Internet (IPN): Architectural Definition which was also published as an Internet Draft in May 2001. This document introduces many of the concepts that have underpinned the development of DTN such as bundling of messages and late binding of addresses, but was, as might be expected, totally focused on the interplanetary case. The DARPA Phase 1 project finished in early 2002 and this bulletin was published reviewing progress so far and looking at the follow-on work.
In the year after the publication of the IPN architectural definition, the work was generalized into an architecture for situations where communication needs to be delay tolerant. The fundamentals of the extended architecture do not differ significantly from the earlier version, but it additionally treats opportunistic encounters as well as the scheduled encounters that underpin the IPN situation. The updated architecture was published as an Internet Draft in September 2002. At the same time, in the IRTF the IPN research group metamorphosed into the DTN research group. Bibliography for the genralized architecture and applications outside the space arena can be found on a separate page DTN Bibliography.
IPN State of the Art as at June 2003
Implementation Efforts in the Space Domain
Exchanging Data between DTN Nodes: The Licklider Transmission Protocol
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Last modified 14 March 2009 by Elwyn Davies
Version 0.1, 14 March 2009 - Architectural part.
Version 0.0, 14 March 2009 - Initial creation
