ISTEconnects

Internet has become the most favorable means of information interchange on earth and now our scientists at NASA have found that this same setup can be used to relay information to and fro SPACE! Though the technology involved will be a little different as on earth the distance between any two points is not astronomically large but for two celestial bodies these distances matter a lot. Due to these distances I.P. which is used on earth cannot be used as the information will have certain lag between the information being passed. The technology being developed here is called the Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). Remote control is very hard when you have a 40-minute round-trip time. DTN was developed to address this problem.

A delay-tolerant network is designed to move data across rough networks--networks that have long delays and noisy connections. Concept of DTN is "bundling," a mechanism for a space network's nodes--probes, relay satellites, and the like--to hold data if the next hop in the network is unavailable. Communications specialists call this a store-and-forward network. This approach contrasts greatly with how nodes handle data on the TCP/IP-driven Internet. An Internet router doesn't keep track of the packets it conveys, nor where they are going beyond the next hop. Only the computer at the endpoint of all this hopping knows that a packet has arrived (and sends the acknowledgment back through the entire chain).

A DTN router, in contrast, keeps a copy of every packet of data sent; at least until the next node has sent a message that it has received it. That scheme ensures that no data gets lost en route, even if a node is offline. Should a relay satellite along an interplanetary Internet slip behind the other side of a moon, a router on a DTN network would simply hold onto the data that needed to be transmitted until that satellite reappeared, or until another one came into position to provide the necessary hop.

While the new protocol is hugely inefficient by earthly standards, using up a lot of memory to hold duplicate copies of data and needing orders of magnitude more time to send complete messages, it is a surefire way to get data to its destination. And it has some other benefits for a device in outer space, which, after all, has other things to worry about besides communicating with Earth.