Store-Carry-and-Forward Research

Proposal is to research and develop store-carry-and-forward technologies for NASA's future communications network. The first major innovation we propose is to separate the metadata bundle header from the bundle payload. Such a technique is not typical of normal packet delivery protocols. Today's Internet Protocol (IP) packets (consisting of header and payload) is not overly large (i.e. 1500 bytes for typical packet sent over Ethernet links) and can easily be buffered for forwarding without stressing the router resources – in particular the storage. However, with a store-carryand- forward (SCF) network, payloads can be extremely large – Megabytes or Gigabytes or more. Due to the large payload size, the combined header and payload is referred to as a "bundle" rather than a packet. Since a SCF router has to look at each bundle before forwarding it and has to do this at the time of, or just prior to, connecting to another SCF router (remember, we are normally disconnected), the need to keep the router (forwarding) tables small is essential. The second innovation we propose is to develop an aggregation scheme. Aggregation enables routing tables to be reduced and enables one to determine up front the amount of resources required to accommodate data storage and transfer in a SCF network. By being able to reactively fragment bundles, aggregation becomes practical. More »