New Year Message 2021

Happy New Year!

I hope you all were able to spend some time with your family and friends over the New Year holidays.

Please allow me to address a few words on the ongoing activities of IPNSIG.

Last year, amid COVID-19, I came to realize that the Internet is literally an essential foundation for our lives, supporting social and economic activities. The Internet has sustained and also enriched our normal daily lives connecting everyone and everything together—even under this unprecedented global crisis.

When we look at the goals of IPNSIG, they present a bold mission for humanity, which is to extend terrestrial networking to space. The InterPlanetary Network (IPN) will allow people and missions to interconnect, enabling humans to expand their social and economic sphere farther into the solar system. I believe IPN will become an essential human asset there, just as we have seen with the internet today.

After I assumed the chair last year, five working groups were defined to broaden the impact of IPNSIG, and some have already started their activities.

This year, we will be sharing and discussing the working group products with the membership, and my hope is that IPNSIG as a whole could deliver this shared vision of IPN to the entire world.

I’m really looking forward to our active discussions as we march forward. I believe we can become a leading initiative of making IPN a reality.

Wishing you all a year full of blessings and filled with new adventures.

Let’s all stay safe.

IPNSIG Chair

Yosuke Kaneko

IPNSIG Newsletter for January 2021

We will be publishing a newsletter every month, highlighting some topics of interest to our membership. Our inaugural newsletter is authored by IPNSIG cofounder and Board Member Vint Cerf.

Enjoy!

As I write these words, I am listening to Jupiter by Holst and thinking about the increased pace of space exploration and development as this third decade of the 21st Century progresses. The commercialization of space is not new, given that communication satellites have been around since 1962 when Telstar 1 was launched, but the ambitious scope of Elon Musk’s Starlink plans and the pace at which SpaceX is launching both crewed and uncrewed vehicles highlight a “space rush” that echoes the “land rushes” of the late 1800s in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Blue Origin (Bezos), OneWeb (UK Government and Bharti Global) and Virgin Galactic (Branson) are all illustrative of this renaissance. Adding to that, there are the multiple successful Moon missions launched by China, the Mars and outer planet missions of the US and Europe and Japan’s mission to the asteroids. Crewed missions are picking up steam with the eight-country Artemis and Gateway missions to return to the Moon. Plans continue for the longer term sample-return and crewed missions to Mars and other deep space targets. New space telescopes are soon to be launched. All of this activity demands enhancement of communication support for the crewed and robotic missions to come.

IPNSIG’s focus on developing space-based networking is relevant and timely. While the design of the Interplanetary Internet, sometimes called the Solar System Internet, began in 1998 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it has reached a new stage of maturity as NASA, ESA, JAXA among others plan infusion of the delay and disruption tolerant Bundle Protocol (BP) into current and planned missions and infrastructure. Active members of IPNSIG are reporting implementation of the Bundle Protocol and its companion Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP) in the Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services Cloud. Implementations are progressing for CubeSats, Raspberry Pi’s and Android-based mobile phones. Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) is becoming a practical reality including an application to track reindeer in the far north of Sweden by the University of Luleå. All of these are signs that IPNSIG’s primary mission, the extension of the conceptual Internet into space, is entering a new and energetic phase.

The expansion of the IPNSIG Board and election of new Board Chair Yosuke Kaneko of JAXA underscores the opportunity for IPNSIG to make material contributions to the maturation of space-based communication protocols. In the months ahead, I hope and expect that we can offer opportunities to IPNSIG members to support the renewed global interest in space exploration and potential commercialization.

What an exciting time to be alive!

Connecting Clouds with DTN

A historical feat connecting clouds with DTN by IPNSIG members!

On Friday, November 27, 2020, Oscar Garcia, Board Member of IPNSIG and developer of the Medical Records System for Space Exploration, and Dr. Larissa Suzuki, Data/AI Practice Lead of United Kingdom and Ireland at Google, DTN expert at Google and member of IPNSIG, made the first DTN-enabled interconnection between servers in the Google and Amazon cloud services.

The first message between the servers was the salutation and response between Mr. Garcia and Dr. Suzuki sent at 5:36 PM UTC (Universal Standard TIme), 12:36 EST. This development, sponsored by IPNSIG, and inspired by Vinton Cerf, Board Member of IPNSIG and one of the Fathers of the Internet, was technically advised by Scott Burleigh, from NASA/JPL and developer of the ION implementation of the DTN Bundle Protocol currently used in the International Space Station, and was supported by Michael Snell, past IPNSIG President and currently Secretary/Treasurer.

This achievement was the product of several months of development in applying the Interplanetary Bundle Protocol to demonstrate the use of DTN techniques to interconnect existing terrestrial systems. Several applications are in development between IPNSIG members and other groups for the utilization of the Bundle Protocol for situations like first responders, medical records, e-commerce and others for conditions where regular Internet connectivity is not permanently available or stable.

http://ipnsig.org/2020/08/08/dtn-for-beginners-info/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5050

For more information please contact info@ipnsig.org