Vint Cerf says new Web space protocols ready for testing
By Erna Mahyuni
Vinton Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, confirmed new InterPlanetary Net (IPN) protocols are due for deep space testing by the end of this year.
The new disruption-tolerant networking protocols are due to be uploaded to the Deep Impact probe still orbiting the sun by end of this year. Cerf said this during his keynote marquee at the World Congress of ICT (WCIT) held in Kuala Lumpur from the 18-21st of May recently.
After near space and deep space testing, the protocols will be uploaded to space stations by early 2009.
Cerf was quick to clarify that the InterPlanetary Net effort isn’t a Google project. He jokingly told the assembled WCIT crowd: “I don’t want you to leave the auditorium saying
Aha! I’ve just figured out Google’s business model – they’re going to take over the solar system.”
Besides touching on Google’s projections for the year 2035 (Cerf estimates that by then 60 billion internet capable devices will be in existence), Cerf shared the challenges inherent to creating a workable Net protocols for space.
“We started out thinking we could use TCP/IP…very quickly we discovered that was not the answer.” Deep Space provided a set of challenges not faced terrestrially due to sheer distance between the planets. “When you do the math you discover that it takes at minimum 3 minutes for a radio signal propagating at the speed of light to get to earth to Mars,” said Cerf.
He also said that the newly developed protocols are about 10-15 times faster than TCP/IP. Cerf closed his keynote with a justification for the whole effort of building an interplanetary internet backbone:
“W’re not planning to say, ‘let’s build an interplanetary backbone system and hope somebody will come’.
We’re just saying: build the standards, use them in all the spacecraft and then take advantage of assets that are still available which can then be repurposed for manned and robotic exploration of the solar system.”
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