Cyberspace Moves Into Outerspace

Over the last thirty years, the terrestrial Internet has grown from a few computers that were networked in a prototype laboratory environment into a vast deployed system that is an indispensable component of the present and future global economy.

Key to its exponential growth has been its underpinning of flexible and “open” standard communications protocols (the TCP/IP suite) that permit diverse applications to instantaneously exchange information.

During the coming thirty years, the terrestrial Internet will experience growth and evolution in ways which are almost unimaginable.

Its communications infrastructure will experience huge increases in capacity, while a large varied of “untethered”, wireless-based applications will emerge as plug-ins to the edges of its fiber/copper communications backbone.

In the process, the Internet’s communications protocols will evolve to meet new challenges.

The next thirty years will also see the need to expand the Internet so that it can serve the communications needs of the progressive expansion of human intelligence into space.

The “InterPlaNetary Internet” initiative has therefore been initiated by DARPA and NASA to chart a course whereby the Internet may move gracefully off-planet.

The purpose of this seminar is to introduce a candidate InterPlanetary Internet (IPN) architecture to the research community and to solicit feedback with respect to its unique challenges.

Seminar Topics