CLEO Orbital Internet earns Time Magazine award
Time Magazine has selected Bundle Protocol testing and the download of an image of the Cape of Good Hope from UK-DMC as one of the ten best inventions of 2008.
In September, a satellite used the new protocol to relay an image of the Cape of Good Hope back to Earth.
The "Orbital Internet" discussed in this award report is enabled by the cooperation around CLEO - a Cisco router in low Earth orbit onboard the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellite, UK-DMC. Lloyd Wood developed this idea from the CLEO project with the support of Cisco Systems Space team, NASA Glenn Research Center and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd at the University of Surrey.
This is not the first award that those involved with CLEO have won for its pioneering work in breaking the final frontier of Internet domination, which includes the Times Higher Education Supplement award 2006 and Computerworld awards.
For this test the Bundle Protocol was implemented by reusing the ground-based testbed built for CLEO. NASA Glenn originally relied on this testbed for preparing the in-orbit CLEO router for use in the satelite environment, but it is now used to develop code for UK-DMC's onboard computers.
The Cape of Good Hope image was downloaded in these experiments by carrying it in the Bundle Protocol over Saratoga. The Bundle Protocol, developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group, is considered a leading candidate for creating the Interplanetary Internet. Saratoga is a fast file transfer protocol for hop-by-hop transfers on privately-owned networks - including the intermittently-connected networks used for delay-tolerant networking.
Find out more about the Internet in Orbit and this work leading to this award on the Bundle Protocol tests page.
Tue, 02.06.2009 15:15
Well done! Very interesting!