News
Beyond Earth: Exploring the Future of Deep Space Communications
An article written by Marc Blanchet, published in the IEEE Communications Society Technology News.
Deep Space IP Presented to Japan Universities WIDE Project
Japan Universities WIDE project is well known to test new network technologies. Viagénie worked with them 25 years ago in the early days of IPv6 deployment. Possible collaboration on space networking is being discussed, starting with our current state of work on Deep Space IP.
Network Management over an IP Transport Suitable for Deep Space
Network management is very important in any network, so it is for deep space IP networking. One can already use SNMP over deep space (we demonstrated it and presented it at last IETF deepspace meeting), or RESTCONF, which is NETCONF (the new network management protocol suite replacing SNMP) over REST-HTTP, which, if run over QUIC, works in deep space. Another way would be NETCONF directly over QUIC, which will also be pretty beneficial for terrestrial networks. Viagenie co-authored the specification of NETCONF over QUIC.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dai-netconf-quic-netconf-over-quic/
YANG Model for Space Links Contact Plans
Contact plans describe when and how spacecrafts will be able to contact each other. Using the NETCONF network management protocol, the modelling of these contact plans is implemented as a YANG model. As an example of its use, It provides hints to the routing engine to preemptively withdraw routes before a contact is terminated, preventing temporarily forwarding failures and enabling faster routing convergence. The model is general and can be used for other means such as temporarily shutting down routers, switches or interfaces during low trafic periods in order to save electricity. Viagenie co-authored the specification, now adopted as an IETF tvr working group document.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tvr-schedule-yang/
0x2Nerds Video Presentation of the Deep Space IP Project
Apstra is organizing a bi-weekly webcast on networking technologies. Jeff Doyle from Juniper and Jeff Tantsura from Nvidia are the host. Viagénie presented the Deep Space IP project.
Network Simulation of Very Large Delays are now possible
if you are working on deep space IP simulations, a great tool is the linux tc netem, enabling the simulations of delays, reordering, loss, duplicates, various bandwidths, ... It is very rich toolset and pretty easy to use. Since recently however, it was restricted to 274s as maximum delay. Not bad for basic simulations, but not enough for real deep space simulations. Viagénie emailed the author and maintainer of the sofware, Stephen Hemminger. After understanding the issue, he quickly fixed it and provided us the patch and it worked so nicely. Now we are able to use it for 2^64 seconds delays (that is probably many galaxies away in light speed!). Thank you so much Stephen. The patch is now pushed into the iproute2 repository.
Deep Space IP Group Meeting in IETF Brisbane
Viagénie is leading a group of experts in networking and space on how to use the Internet Protocol Suite in deep space. A meeting was held during the IETF week in Brisbane.
An HTTP Request Sent to Voyager!
Viagénie sent an HTTP request to Voyager! and got back the answer! Not that Voyager has an HTTP server obviously. But in Viagénie’s deep space IP testbed, we were able to use a QUIC stack (QUINN), passing on some transport configuration suitable for deep space and then simulate a 18 hours one-way delay, so 36 hours round trip time! We also simulated SNMP and NTP on the same testbed with 8 hours round trip time and it worked flawlessly! Deep space IP is being demonstrated!
Revisiting the Use of the IP Protocol Stack in Deep Space: Assessment and Possible Solutions
Viagénie is the primary author of the assessment document on how to use the Internet Protocol stack for deep space usage. The new version just posted includes more information on how QUIC can be used and the use of the CoAP protocol.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-many-deepspace-ip-assessment/