Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (USA)
Date: September 29, 13:15 - 13:45 Room: Sala 3M
Communication networks on Earth, most notably the Internet, have proven enormously valuable in enabling coordination among people and automated systems on a planetary scale. Constructing such a network – deployed primarily not for interchange with Earth but rather for in situ operational communications – could be of comparable value in the exploration and eventual settlement of another planet, such as Mars. Deployment of a planetary network on Mars will be subject to some constraints that did not confront the developers of the Internet, such as the absence of pre-existing telephone network infrastructure, the limited availability of electrical power, and the variability of the Martian ionosphere. This talk will examine some of these constraints and offer some thoughts on how the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture might be helpful in addressing them.
Scott Burleigh has been developing flight mission software at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1986. He is a co-author of the DTN Architecture definition (Internet RFC 4838) and is a co-author of the specification for the DTN Bundle Protocol (BP, Internet RFC 5050) supporting automated data forwarding through a network of intermittently connected nodes. Since 2005 he has led the development and maintenance of an implementation of the DTN architecture that is designed for integration into deep space mission software, with the long-term goal of enabling deployment of a delay-tolerant Solar System Internet; this software is currently in continuous operation on the International Space Station and is offered on SourceForge as open source code. Mr. Burleigh has received the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal and four NASA Space Act Board Awards for his work on the design and implementation of the DTN communication protocols.