Vint Cerf Eyes Interplanetary InternetVint Cerf Eyes Interplanetary Internet

I've never much considered the potential latency of packets routed between Earth and Mars. Me, I'm more worried about my cable-modem going down or dropped 3G calls. Fortunately, Vint Cerf, co-developer of TCP/IP and currently a Google evangelist, is among a group of more forward-thinking folks envisioning an interplanetary backbone where network traffic hubs could be hundreds of millions of miles apart.When I first heard about the Interplanetary Internet effort, I thought maybe it was a joke. But then I read Rob Pegoraro's Fast Forward column, about a speech Cerf gave recently in Washington, D.C. Here's the relevant portion:

"The fun part of the talk came when he moved to discussing his plans for "InterPlaNetary Internet." This seemingly science-fiction effort aims to solve a genuine problem: the point-to-point communication that has worked acceptably well for individual missions to other planets doesn't scale as we send more hardware Out There and expect more data back. A networked communications system would make more sense, but the Internet's protocols need to be adapted. Specifically, they can't handle the long latency of communication from here to Mars or beyond -- "The speed of light is too slow," he noted -- and they do need to have every packet of data authenticated, given the costs of a compromised system stuck 200 million miles away." I particularly enjoyed Cerf's dry remark about the speed of light. He was speaking to an audience of government contractors, so presumably they "got it," though I think these days even casual Star Trek viewers understand that 3 x 10⁸ meters/sec is a hard upper limit. The InterPlaNetary Internet, and that funky spelling, actually comes from an ongoing project and special interest group, of which Cerf is a member at large. (Go here to see the IPN SIG page.) According to the IPN SIG page: