NASA has taken a step toward creating a Solar System-wide internet by establishing operational delay/disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) service on the International Space Station. The DTN service will provide more efficient bandwidth utilization to help automate and improve data availability for space station experimenters.

DTN works by providing a reliable and automatic data network that stores partial bundles of data in nodes along a communication path until they can be forwarded or retransmitted, then rebundled at the final destination—either to ground stations on Earth, robotic spacecraft in deep space or, one day, humans living on other planets. This differs from traditional Internet Protocols, which require all nodes in the transmission path to be available during the same time frame for successful data transmittal.In addition to its use in space, DTN can benefit earthbound environments where communications are unreliable, such as disaster-response areas. Image credit: NASA.

According to NASA, this first use of the service as an operational capability on a space mission marks the beginning of the space station as a node in the evolving Solar System Internet. In addition to its use in space, the agency says DTN can benefit earthbound environments where communications are unreliable, such as disaster-response areas.

"Our experience with DTN on the space station leads to additional terrestrial applications, especially for mobile communications in which connections may be erratic and discontinuous,” says Dr. Vinton Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist for Google, who collaborated with NASA on the project. “In some cases, battery power will be an issue and devices may have to postpone communication until battery charge is adequate. These notions are relevant to the emerging 'Internet of Things.'"

To ensure wide adoption of DTN, NASA worked with the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems and the Internet Engineering Task Force for international standardization. In addition, many DTN implementations are publicly available as open-source code, making them available to the growing number of collaborators in space, including university researchers, commercial networking developers, CubeSat developers and space station payload developers.

The space station will initially use two of them—NASA’s Interplanetary Overlay Network implementation and the IRTF’s DTN2 implementation.