I found out about this mailing list today.
It's uncannily similar to something I've been wondering about for the
past few weeks... namely the behaviour of TCP/IP in extreme
conditions. The meaning of "extreme" I've been playing with was at the
level of having routers in orbit around the various planets and moons
of the solar system, and other nodes moving about at various speeds,
at distances from the Sun up to about the distance the Voyagers will
reach in 20 to 30 years. On the face of it, this mailing list sounded
like it might cover much of the same ground: low bandwidth, extreme
variation in round-trip times, very high error rates and delays.
(Stevens says TCP defaults to regarding 9 minutes as failure, which
wouldn't even get you to Mars. Presumably you could recompile with
upper limits in the multi-hour range, for the sake of argument.)
I'd looked into "mobile IP" but it didn't QUITE seem the same sort of
thing.
Indeed, since it's based at NASA, this list might even be planning to
consider interplanetary scales. Is it?
-- Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk) When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that _they_ have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.
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