IPNSIG Academy Webinar Presentation coming June 1, 2022
Presenter: Vint Cerf
More details, including a registration link, will be published soon. Abstract below.
Title: Origin and Evolution of Delay and Disruption Tolerant Protocols
Abstract: The origin of the Bundle Protocol Suite reaches back to 1998 and a fortuitous meeting of a group of JPL engineers and an MCI executive in the Spring of that year—but the story starts much earlier. The JPL team had worked for years to introduce packet switching concepts into point-to-point space communications such as Prox-1 and service applications like the CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP).
With the successful landing of the Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover vehicle on July 4, 1997, a new chapter in Mars exploration began. The JPL team, along with a few contractors and the MCI executive began discussing what they should be working on that might be needed 25 years later. Their conclusion: the design and implementation of an interplanetary Internet.
They quickly considered and abandoned the application of the TCP/IP and DNS protocol suite as they considered the vast and variable distances between the planets and the disruption of planetary rotation, solar and planetary orbits of satellites and space vehicles. Out of these early configuration discussions emerged the concept of delay and disruption tolerance and the Bundle Protocol (BP) and its companion, the Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP).
In this talk, the history and development of these key protocols will be explored along with a glimpse of the near-term future of interplanetary networking.