Increasingly,
network applications must communicate with counterparts across disparate networking
environments characterized by significantly different sets of physical and operational
constraints; wide variations in transmission latency are particularly troublesome.
The proposed Interplanetary Internet, which must encompass both terrestrial and
interplanetary links, is an extreme case. An architecture based on a "least
common denominator" protocol that can operate successfully and (where required)
reliably in multiple disparate environments would simplify the development and
deployment of such applications. The highly successful architecture and supporting
protocols of today's Internet are ill suited for this purpose. But Delay Tolerant
Networking will crossover this bottle-neck. In this seminar the fundamental principles
that would underlie a delay-tolerant networking (DTN) architecture and the main
structural elements of that architecture, centered on a new end-to-end overlay
network protocol called Bundling is examined.The
US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as part of its "Next
Generation Internet" initiative, has recently been supporting a small group
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California to study the technical
architecture of an "Interplanetary Internet". The idea was to blend
ongoing work in standardized space communications capabilities with state of the
art techniques being developed within the terrestrial Internet community, with
a goal of facilitating a transition as the Earth's Internet moves off-planet.
The "Interplanetary Internet" name was deliberately coined to suggest
a far-future integration of space and terrestrial
communications infrastructure
to support the migration of human intelligence throughout the Solar System. Joining
the JPL team in this work was one of the original designers of the Internet and
co-inventor of the "Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol"
(TCP/IP) protocol suite. Support for the work has recently transitioned from DARPA
to NASA.
