Via Yahoo’s Tech News:

The US space agency NASA said it successfuly conducted a first test of a deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” Adrian Hooke, NASA’s manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards, said in a statement.

The US space agency said Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA spacecraft some 20 million miles (32.4 million kilometers) from Earth.

NASA said the software protocol, which must be able to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space, was designed in partnership with Vint Cerf, a vice president at Internet search giant Google.

DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet’s Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed, NASA said.

Unlike TCP/IP, DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection, NASA said, noting that glitches can happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms and long communication delays occur.

It said the delay, for example, in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half minutes and 20 minutes at the speed of light.

NASA said that if a destination path cannot be found, data packets are not discarded but kept by each network node until it can communicate safely with another node.

Eventually, it said, the information is delivered to the end user.

A more detailed description can be found at the IEEE website:

The authors give an overview of current work on delay- and disruption-tolerant networking and review the overall architecture proposed by the Internet Research Task Force’s Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group. Their approach to networking makes no assumption that nodes will have end-to-end connectivity, which could be missing with extremely high-latency connections, if the nodes are only in contact with one another infrequently or if contacts are being continually disrupted. They also describe the main protocols the group is developing and give examples of some pilot networks that use these protocols.