September Newsletter

We are glad to share that the IPNSIG Architecture and Governance Working Group (AWG) held a workshop on Routing in Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking over four days, from August 22 to 25, 2022. The goal of the workshop was to look at the various routing approaches and to produce a recommendation toward realizing a common interplanetary network architecture.

During the workshop, the group looked into the following routing approaches:

• Routing in European Space Agency (ESA) Bundle Protocol (BP) Implementation, presented by Felix Flentge

• Schedule-Aware Bundle Routing (SABR), also known as Contact Graph Routing (CGR), presented by Scott Burleigh

• REDMARS Routing, presented by Marius Feldmann and Felix Walter

• Spacetime Routing, presented by Brian Barritt

• Shortest-Path Tree Routing for Space Networks (SPSN), presented by Olivier de Jonckere)

• Opportunistic forwarding approaches – constrained flooding

  • PROPHeT, Spray and Wait, presented by Juan Fraire

  • Opportunistic CGR, presented by Scott Burleigh

• Inter-Regional Forwarding, presented by Scott Burleigh

As a result, AWG has produced the following recommendation:

The IPNSIG, as an organization under the Internet Society, advocates the concept of establishing a common, interoperable, autonomous and scalable routing framework within the Solar System Internet. We believe this is crucial to achieving a resilient and sustainable communication environment in space.

We express our willingness to facilitate and expect interested communities to further pursue the refinement and advancement of a technical solution in support of this goal.

We underline four important aspects for the future of Routing in Solar System Internet:

• Autonomy

  • The overall goal is to populate forwarding tables or routing tables (where appropriate) without human intervention and depart from the Earth-centric management scheme

• Commonality

  • To enable Autonomy we need a common and standardized way of the following:

    • The population of a Forwarding and (where routes are computed) Routing Table

    • Function enabling the bundle protocol agent to access a forwarding table API that answers the question: “where should I send this bundle and with what CLA/address?”, similar to ARP lookup Interoperability

    • Define a common to every Node set of functions

• Interoperability

  • Inter-regional routing should be based on a common standard

  • Intra-regional routing could be heterogeneous, adopting methods that suit the needs of a specific environment or a mission

  • Inter- and Intra-region routing should be interoperable

• Scalability

  • Architecture needs to be structured in some way (Hierarchy)

  • Node IDs, Addressing Schemes, and segmenting concepts need to be further explored to accommodate the scale of the SSI

You can find the summary report here and our recommendations report here.

IPNSIG is Now Tax Exempt

IPNSIG Receives Tax Exempt Status from the US Internal Revenue Service

The Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group (IPNSIG) has received confirmation from the US Internal Revenue Service that it is now qualified to operate as a non-profit, charitable, tax-exempt organization. In simple terms, this means that donations to IPNSIG can be treated by donors as tax-deductible contributions for US Federal Income Tax purposes. The IPNSIG Board believes that this status will provide additional incentive for supporters to provide resources that allow IPNSIG to accomplish its primary mission: to help standardize and demonstrate the readiness of the Bundle Protocol Suite to support the implementation of a Solar System Internet that can, in turn, support the exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System.

This was also the last major milestone to accomplish in order to formalize our status as an Internet Society Chapter (rather than a SIG). ISOC has changed the way they manage SIGs, and it made more sense for us to continue our affiliation with the Internet Society as a Chapter. However, we will be retaining the name IPNSIG in order to avoid confusion with many of our external friends, who have been used to referring to us as IPNSIG for over twenty years. We are incorporated in the State of California as IPNSIG, Inc.

We want to thank especially our Secretary/Treasurer, Michael Snell, for his persistent due diligence in accomplishing this registration.

Yosuke Kaneko, on behalf of the IPNSIG Board

New AWG Secretariat

IPNSIG welcomes new Secretariat for AWG IPNSIG is pleased to announce the selection of Helen Tabunshchyk to play the role of Secretariat for our Architecture & Governance Working Group (AWG). This adds a critical resource necessary to the success of the AWG.

We appreciate Helen’s willingness to undertake this responsibility, and look forward to her contributions towards achieving the goals of the AWG.