State of the Art and Innovative Communications and Networking Solutions for a Reliable and Efficient Interplanetary Internet

In the last few years deep space exploration missions are undergoing a significant transformation as are the expectations of their scientific investigators and the public who participate in these experiences. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency (ESA), recently, decided pursuing a mission to study Jupiter and its moons, and another to visit the largest moons of Saturn. Those missions need new communication and networking infrastructures able to support space exploration, to connect scientists and their instruments, and also to involve the public via common web interfaces. A possible solution is represented by the so called InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet that introduces new challenges in the field of deep space communications. In that framework, the paper proposes a description of the challenging scenario, surveys its technical problems and envisages possible advanced communications and networking solutions starting from the analysis of a specific IPN architecture. In more detail, we study the network performance changes due to the nodes’ movements from the communications and the networking viewpoint. It represents the main contribution of the paper and opens the doors to future advanced solutions suited to be employed in the IPN Internet.