The Sky is NOT the Limit Anymore: Future Architecture of the Interplanetary Internet

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The ever-growing popularity of space exploration has attracted many organizations and private companies to attempt increasingly challenging missions. Each of these missions bring us one step closer to the colonization of the solar system. Many initiatives have been taken to aim at providing an architecture in the so-called interplanetary (IPN) Internet to serve these upcoming missions. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary, scalable, and extensible architecture that adapted the current IPN communication challenges and the milestones of future space exploration missions. This architecture provides the foundations for the communication and navigation services to run the missions. We introduce the key elements of our architecture, from the communication spectrum and technologies to the physical elements to place in deep space, going through the communication protocols with support of delay tolerant network (DTN), autonomous operation, and software defined networks (SDN). We then analyze the implications of such architecture on data delivery over the (Jupiter → Mars → Earth) path. We finally perform a preliminary performance evaluation of the architecture to support our proposal and display the evolution of the end-to-end latency at each milestone.