By J. Nicholas Hoover at Information Week
“The test used NASA’s Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol, which the space agency a decade ago jointly developed with TCP/IP co-inventor and Google VP Vint Cerf. The technology can withstand delays and disruptions that might be common in space due to long distances and obstacles like planets and solar storms. Unlike Internet Protocol, which establishes an end-to-end connection before sending data, DTN moves data node-to-node, and can wait for connections to open up before relaying information to further nodes.”