Inter-Planetary Network Special Interest Group
47 comments
·July 24, 2025OhMeadhbh
jvanderbot
I used to work with some of those board members at JPL!
DTN is cool stuff. We had a few applications built up for distributed "delay aware" computing so that you could, at the network/application boundary, farm out jobs for e.g., an orbiting compute cluster coming over the horizon.
Really fun times.
bigfatkitten
And there are lots of open implementations to play with!
rippeltippel
It's also noteworthy that DTN can be used on Earth too, especially in remote places with poor/unreliable data connections. There's some interesting literature about those applications, which was my first approach to DTN when I started working with it.
philipwhiuk
I'm not sure how seriously I take an organisation supposedly focused on interplanetary space where the main advertised event seems to be Raspberry Pi workshops.
There are many conferences and academic discussions that spend a long time bikeshedding while industry actually does stuff.
The lack of involvement from industry in a field where stuff is happening suggests to me this is one of them.
Sanzig
Most of what they do is Layer 2 and above, so it's hardware agnostic - prototyping on a Pi is fine.
Their work is gaining traction. DTN Bundle Protocol has been baselined for the LunaNet specification, which a bunch of private companies are designing to for lunar relay networks. Bundle Protocol is also currently on the CCSDS standards track so it should be formally part of the CCSDS protocol suite soon.
For those unaware: CCSDS is the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, they set widely used standards for spacecraft communications protocols. Basically anything beyond Earth orbit flies some variant of a CCSDS protocol stack, and a substantial chunk of missions in Earth orbit do as well, particularly if they are government funded. It's an international effort, China and Russia participate too so that everyone can communicate if need be.
0points
> The lack of involvement from industry in a field where stuff is happening suggests to me this is one of them.
Remind me again, which companies are going inter-planetary?
dcminter
Off topic, but...
> to cuss and discuss
...is a turn of phrase that's new to me and I love it. Totally stealing that.
OhMeadhbh
It's from my 7th grade history teacher, Mr. Mooneyham. As in "tomorrow we're going to cuss and discuss the Louisiana Purchase. Make sure you read chapter 12." He was also the teacher who had the "Super-Duper Discussion Stick" which he used to hit your desk if you fell asleep in class. And at least once he played the version of the "Devil Went Down to Georgia" w/ the bad words left in.
In the old days, public schools in suburban Texas were quirky, but the quality of education was relatively decent. For instance, I remember that Thomas Jefferson was president in 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase was finalized.
null
LorenDB
IMO the most likely solution to interplanetary networking is to throw tons of datacenter and compute that's anywhere more than a few light-seconds from the nearest existing datacenter, then use something along the lines of IPFS to perform data synchronization between planets.
bigfatkitten
Despite the name, IPFS has no properties that make it suitable for this application. It’s very bandwidth intensive and isn’t designed with latency or disruption tolerance in mind.
knome
there's a lot of interesting problems just in the networking.
if it took four years for a message to cross the void from where you are to the recipient, you certainly wouldn't want to wait a full eight years to see they didn't send a receipt message and only then retransmit.
eight years is some awful latency.
you'd probably want to send each message at something like a fibonacci over the months. so, gaps of (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc) would mean sending the message on months (1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 20, 33, etc) until you got a confirmation message that they had received it. they would similarly want to send confirmations in the same sort of pattern until they stopped receiving copies of that message.
spreading the resends out over time would ensure not all of your bandwidth was going to retransmissions. you'd want that higher number of initial transmissions in hopes that enough of the message makes it across the void that they would have started sending receipts reasonably close to the four years the initial message would take to get there.
if you had the equivalent of a galactic fido-net system, it could be decades and lifetimes between messages sent to distant stars and messages sent back.
furyofantares
Wouldn't you want to completely saturate your bandwidth? Just always be transmitting whatever message has been transmitted the least.
knome
that would probably depend on how much power it takes to send the messages, how much actual usable bandwidth you could manage over the distances involved, and how much data you want to send.
if it takes a large amount of energy to send the data, we probably wouldn't want to run the equipment all the time. strong pulses would let the equipment cool down or recharge capacitor banks or whatever during downtime.
interstellar dust and other debris floating through space could cause interference, not to mention radiation from everything else around us, and our own sun shining right next to our little laser.
might want to move the laser out onto pluto or something to avoid having it right up against the sun.
toast0
You'd want to do a lot of work with erasure codes as well.
Sanzig
It would be a lot more efficient to use erasure coding + heavy interleaving with other traffic so that you can withstand a maximum predicted outage period.
scottyah
and you'd probably want to take orbits/vectors into account, a djikstra-esque algorithm where the distances change is crazy.
Also, our signals are usually going very short distances very quickly and are very protected from solar/cosmic waves by the ionosphere. What kind of data loss could you get transmitting in open space across vast distances and time?
Sanzig
Interstellar space is pretty empty, and we have good models for it thanks to the radio astronomy community. Dispersion is low enough to be nearly negligible, even over tens of light years.
Determining theoretical interstellar link rates is a fairly straightforward link budgeting exercise, easier in fact than most terrestrial link calculations because you don't have multipath to worry about.
jvanderbot
I agree! This was my obsession when I worked at JPL, unfortunately the answer was usually "no mission will sacrifice their budget for reusable assets".
You'd need a mission whose purpose is to emplace compute stations.
That's why we can't have nice things.
r14c
you'd probably want a different protocol than IPFS for that application. managing a DHT with extremely high latency isn't going to work very well. something like named-data networking would probably work better since the transmitter can know
1. exactly what prefixes need to be buffered based on the received interest messages from deep space 2. exactly which data rate is possible at any given time 3. exactly how much data needs to be sent from the buffer in each transmission
optimizing for high latency really pushes your design choices around compared to our comparatively very low latency uses here on earth. its pretty interesting to think about.
macintux
How would that work to, say, Mars? Have satellites filling many, many orbits between the two planets?
cjtrowbridge
We already have an interplanetary internet called the NASA Deep Space Network. Understanding it's limitations and challenges is a good way to start thinking about this.
BizarroLand
Nah, nothing that extreme. The broadcast range and bandwidth of even current technology in space could handle a huge amount of fairly rapid data transfer between the two planets.
It would be more like a handful of satellites, some orbiting earth, some orbiting mars, and then a handful of relay satellites serving as intermediaries.
Don't count on playing e-sports competitively, though.
The lag under ideal conditions would be insane, about 2.5 minutes each way (when the planets are "only" 40 million kilometers apart), but with repeaters and overhead probably closer to twice that.
macintux
The comment was a few light-seconds. That's a lot of hops to Mars to fill to sustain that coverage year-round.
unit149
[dead]
rippeltippel
Author of the initial versions of DTNPerf (iperf for DTNs) and some related papers. I moved on to other areas of SW engineering, but glad to know DTN technology is still looked after. I recently learned that ESA are looking into that as well.
webdevver
star wars except its comcast 'accidentally' destroying starlink sattelite links with 'debris'
t1234s
Could quantum entanglement eliminate the delay?
tekne
lowwave
What about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Experiments_at_Space_S... ?
blendergeek
No. That does not allow faster than light communication (which is impossible)
ieee-e
There are too many graphics (>0) and not enough monospaced font for me to take this seriously.
jibal
Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, Jon Postel (RFC editor) and I all worked together at UCLA. I was there the day the IMP arrived. Heady days.
jibal
I was at UCLA with Vint Cerf ... very cool guy.
userulluipeste
"We work to extend terrestrial networking into solar system space..."
Minor nitpick: it's the Solar System - i.e. capitalized (since it's a proper name). The Solar System is the planetary system that we reside in, the one that has the star Sol at its center.
yencabulator
> When not used as a proper noun and written without capitalization, "solar system" may refer to either the Solar System itself or any system reminiscent of the Solar System.[14]
They're solving for other solar systems too!
With all the jibber-jabber about Starlink being down, I figured it was an appropriate time to remind people this exists. Vint Cerf, one of the founding wizzards of the internet, established the IPN SIG in 1998 to cuss and discuss issues related to IP protocols over high-latency, potentially high-loss links. Worth poking around if you've not seen it before, though I sort of wish there were more use cases regarding information security.