This paper explores a simple question: How would we provide a high-quality search experience on Mars, where the fundamental physical limit is speed-of-light propagation delays on the order of tens of minutes? On Earth, users are accustomed to nearly instantaneous response times from search engines. Is it possible to overcome orders-of-magnitude longer latency to provide a tolerable user experience on Mars? In this paper, we formulate the searching from Mars problem as a tradeoff between "effort" (waiting for responses from Earth) and "data transfer" (pre-fetching or caching data on Mars). The contribution of our work is articulating this design space and presenting two case studies that explore the effectiveness of baseline techniques, using publicly available data from the TREC Total Recall and Sessions Tracks. We intend for this research problem to be aspirational and inspirational - even if one is not convinced by the premise of Mars colonization, there are Earth-based scenarios such as searching from a rural village in India that share similar constraints, thus making the problem worthy of exploration and attention from researchers.
In this work, we assume that a functional interplanetary Internet already exists, and that the only problem we need to overcome is latency at the application layer. This is not an unrealistic assumption as other researchers have been exploring high-latency network links in the context of what is known as delay-tolerant networking (see, for example, IETF RFC 4838 https: tools.ietf.org html rfc4838 ) and NASA has already begun experimental deployments on the International Space Station. http: www.nasa.gov mission_pages station research experiments 730.html Once again, there are many similarities between building interplanetary connectivity and enhancing connectivity in developing regions. Examples of the latter include DakNet @cite_0 , deploying wifi access points on buses to provide intermittent connectivity to users along their routes and the work of @cite_15 to ferry data using mechanical backhaul (i.e., sneakernet)---which isn't very different from our proposal to put a cache of the web on a Mars-bound rocket (more details later).
@cite_0 @cite_15
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Increasingly, network applications must communicate with counterparts across disparate networking environments characterized by significantly different sets of physical and operational constraints; wide variations in transmission latency are particularly troublesome. The proposed Interplanetary Internet, which must encompass both terrestrial and interplanetary links, is an extreme case. An architecture based on a "least common denominator" protocol that can operate successfully and (where required) reliably in multiple disparate environments would simplify the development and deployment of such applications. The Internet protocols are ill suited for this purpose. We identify three fundamental principles that would underlie a delay-tolerant networking (DTN) architecture and describe the main structural elements of that architecture, centered on a new end-to-end overlay network protocol called Bundling. We also examine Internet infrastructure adaptations that might yield comparable performance but conclude that the simplicity of the DTN architecture promises easier deployment and extension. The developments in the space technologies are enabling the realization of deep space scientific missions such as Mars exploration. InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet is expected to be the next step in the design and development of deep space networks as the Internet of the deep space planetary networks. However, there exist significant challenges to be addressed for the realization of this objective. Many researchers and several international organizations are currently engaged in defining and addressing these challenges and developing the required technologies for the realization of the InterPlaNetary Internet. In this paper, the current status of the research efforts to realize the InterPlaNetary Internet objective is captured. The communication architecture is presented, and the challenges posed by the several aspects of the InterPlaNetary Internet are introduced. The existing algorithms and protocols developed for each layer and the other related work are explored, and their shortcomings are pointed out along with the open research issues for the realization of the InterPlaNetary Internet. The objective of this survey is to motivate the researchers around the world to tackle these challenging problems and help to realize the InterPlaNetary Internet. Several multihop applications developed for vehicular ad hoc networks use broadcast as a means to either discover nearby neighbors or propagate useful traffic information to other vehicles located within a certain geographical area. However, the conventional broadcast mechanism may lead to the so-called broadcast storm problem, a scenario in which there is a high level of contention and collisions at the link layer due to an excessive number of broadcast packets. While this is a well-known problem in mobile ad hoc wireless networks, only a few studies have addressed this issue in the VANET context, where mobile hosts move along the roads in a certain limited set of directions as opposed to randomly moving in arbitrary directions within a bounded area. Unlike other existing works, we quantify the impact of broadcast storms in VANETs in terms of message delay and packet loss rate in addition to conventional metrics such as message reachability and overhead. Given that VANET applications are currently confined to using the DSRC protocol at the data link layer, we propose three probabilistic and timer-based broadcast suppression techniques: weighted p-persistence, slotted 1-persistence, and slotted p-persistence schemes, to be used at the network layer. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes can significantly reduce contention at the MAC layer by achieving up to 70 percent reduction in packet loss rate while keeping end-to-end delay at acceptable levels for most VANET applications. In ad hoc networks, performance objectives are often in contention with each other. Indeed, due to the transmission errors incurred over wireless channels, it is difficult to achieve a high rate of transmission in conjunction with reliable delivery of data and low latency. In order to obtain favorable throughput and delay performances, the system may choose to compromise on its reliability and have nodes forcibly dropping a small fraction of packets. The focus of this paper is on the characterization of tradeoffs between the achievable throughput, end-to-end delay and reliability in wireless networks with random access. We consider a multihop ad hoc network comprising several source-destination pairs communicating wirelessly via the slotted ALOHA channel access scheme. Employing ideas from statistical mechanics, we present an analytical framework for evaluating the throughput, end-to-end delay and reliability performances of the system. The main findings of this paper are (a) when the system is noise-limited, dropping a small fraction of packets in the network leads to a smaller end-to-end delay though the throughput suffers as well, and (b) when the system is interference-limited, however, there exist regimes where dropping a few packets in the network may actually reduce the end-to-end delay as well as increase the system throughput. We also present some empirical results which corroborate the results obtained analytically.