The first permanent node of the “interplanetary internet” has been installed and tested out aboard the International Space Station. According to NASA this could be the first communication setup to span the solar system one day. This was first tried out last fall when a spacecraft called EPOXI on its way to a comet rendezvous used the system to send images back to its controllers on Earth. Now the researchers are ready to test it out in regular communications with the space station. So in a few months astronauts will be able to tweet live from the international space station. Vint Cer with NASA co-designed the protocol that is used across our common Internet. While we use TCP/IP protocol to allow distant machines to communicate, the ISS uses delay-tolerant networking which is being developed to cope with the patchy coverage in space that arises when the spacecraft passes behind planets or suffer power outages. The new DTN protocol doesn’t expect constant communication between machines, as the TCP/IP protocol does. Instead, data is transmitted from node to node in bundles, and each node is instructed to hold on to its bundle until it can communicate with another node that is able to receive the data.

[Discovermagazine]