Towards Interplanetary QUIC Traffic

And talks to really good really neat wins! Simulated in-process network, tapping Quinn's AsyncUdpSocket and UdpPoller. Cool, nice. Better debugging with pcap, nice. Determinism, nice.

I do want a bit more of an ending though! Glad to see the work open sourced. +1 the thanks to Marc Blanchet for all his help & pushing that push. Also very fun reading their draft (linked in post), An Architecture for IP in Deep Space, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-many-tiptop-ip-archit...

> How can QUIC be viable, then? The attentive reader might already have spotted the answer: the problem isn’t QUIC, but its default configuration, which was designed with terrestrial internet in mind. What we need is a custom configuration, this time targeting deep space, with guidelines to tweak things further if a space mission deems it necessaryy.

I'd expect that there's a ton of work for "bandwidth shaping" interplanetary QUIC that's probably missing, even if it just needs to be basically nulled out on the way across the x-mitters. Guess it's open source & I can dive in & see what was done here!

QUIC has a connection setup protocol, a stream reconstruction protocol, a stream management protocol, a adaptive channel parameter discovery protocol, a resend protocol, a channel bandwidth distribution protocol, and probably a few more that I can not think of off the top of my head just for normal stream oriented transport.

What you really want in this sort of use case is most things except adaptive channel parameter discovery (i.e. half of congestion control). You should already know the expected channel bandwidth and latency and can instead adapt in-context rather than using totally generic mechanisms designed under the assumption of a “uniform/static” network.

As I understand, this type of intermittence will mostly be a solved problem by the time there are only a few relay satellites around a planet. I think the moon may already have enough for full coverage. (It does not have to be a full-on starlink-like network, Musk is a bit delusional about this)

Still interesting and potentially useful to design around it regardless.

You still need a protocol for point to point and maybe that's where QUIC plays a role, but wouldn't make more sense to use something like email?

The distances and latencies are so large, that you want to send a file to the next hop in the network, and from there to the next one, and so on.

For high latency and high packet loss links, like one described in the article, you'll probably need pre-emptive retransmits and I am not sure that simply tuning parameters will get there. Retransmitting before loss is detected cuts bandwidth, but I suspect will improve end to end latency.

[1] https://science.nasa.gov/learn/basics-of-space-flight/chapte...

[2] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-updates/2024/...

[3] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5540/has-an-interp...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hbZSwvXpZ4

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/dtn/about/

Various other sessions / meetings:

* https://www.ietf.org/meeting/124/

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC86T-6ZTP5hpTncHTKkY...