Sandbox

Meeting the Father of the Internet

February 28th, 2009 by Sandbox

photo: stephtara

A living legend for geeks from all continents, Vint Cerf is a 65-year-old computer scientist who co-invented the TCP/IP protocol and who is most frequently considered to be the father of the Internet as we know it today.

His three-piece suit and his beard make him look like Matrix’ Architect, though with a sense of humor. He is now a Google vice-president, and their Chief Internet Evangelist.

In this talk in Geneva during LIFT09, Vint Cerf mentioned the biggest challenges now faced by the information and communication technology, two of which have particularly raised our attention:

We must increase the number of IP addresses
An IP address is an identification assigned to a computer, allowing him to communicate with other devices over the Internet. As the research program started in the seventies, which led to the current form of Internet, no one could tell how many possible addresses should be created for the purpose of the experiment.  The plan was to do a low scale test, before launching a “production version” of the Internet. The immediate success had the consequence that there has never been a production version.

The IP addresses had been defined as a 32 bit number, which gives a total of 4’294’967’296 possible addresses. With 542 million computers connected to the Internet, and 3.5 billion devices, we are already reaching capacity limits, although we still have 80% of the world to connect. A new kind of Internet Protocol (IPv6) will use a 128 bits technology and will allow for 3.4×10ˆ38 possible addresses, which should cover our needs for the next couple of decades.

InterPlaNet: Interplanetary Internet
One of humanity’s biggest hopes – at least for some scientists – is to once be able to colonize other planets and therefore free us from being too dependable on the future of the Earth.

But we will have to “space-enable” Internet before that: what would be life on Mars if you wouldn’t be able to add your earthan friends on Facebook? Before sending humans to other planets, we will have to figure out how to send data. It doesn’t seem to be a big deal as we already send and receive data to and from satellites, but Internet is a much richer communication system, and the current protocols were not thought for interplanetary stuff.

The problem? “The distance between the planets is literally astronomical, and at the speed of light, it takes 3.5 minutes for a signal to propagate to Mars.” So if your computer makes a request, it will have to wait at least 7 minutes until receiving the answer, and the current internet protocols have been designed to handle delays of some milliseconds, not minutes. Another problem is celestial motion: “planets have the nasty habit of rotating and we haven’t figured out how to stop that yet”. There are people working on this and the InterPlaNet should be ready in November 09.