Thrive: Vint Cerf

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Google's chief internet evangelist sings the praises of networking in deep space.

Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist for Google, is widely known as a "Father of the Internet." Cerf is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the internet. In an interview with Prosper's editors, he shares his thoughts on the future of the internet, the early days and uses for interplanetary networks.

"I believe that the places where the biggest results are going to come back are in the higher layers of protcol and applications that are creating artificial environments.

"Above the basic packet-switching network, you're creating these artificial environments of game playing, you're creating virtual spaces. You're creating the web 2.0 notions where business processes are interacting through the network. You're looking at applications in the mobile world, which, by the way, is a huge and important area because there are 2.5 billion mobiles out there and another billion in 2007. Lots of people will first be able to get to the internet through their mobiles.

"Our objectives changed with time, in the sense that we were initially focused on just getting this thing to work. We had these three networks and they were already there. We had to make them inter-work somehow. So we were completely focused on the technology of it and the application was sort of secondary. In fact, we didn't really know what the applications were other than a hazy "it's for command and control" kind of thing.

"The other thing that was missing (when the internet first started) was strong authentication. It's easy to spoof everywhere. It's easy to spoof email, you can spoof IP addresses and all that.

"Several of us apparently were thinking in parallel at the jet propulsion laboratory. When we got together, within 30 seconds we were finishing each other's sentences. So at JPL we started a project called the interplanetary network. And we wanted to take the existing deep space network and the very primitive protocols that are being used to support spacecraft that are in operation.

"It's working fine terrestrially and it's working okay in low-earth orbit because the delays are low. But when it takes 40 minutes for a radio signal to go from Earth to Mars and back and worse when you get farther out, then the standard protocols simply don't work. So what we quickly discovered is that we had to redesign a whole new set of protocols that were delay tolerant and disruption tolerant. We did that, we've been working on it since 1998.

"We've got to the point now where not only do we have the standard protocol where we'd like to propose that NASA and the other space agencies use it for deep space networking, but we've also discovered there are terrestrial applications. So this interplanetary design has now been morphed into this whole new genre called delay-and-disruption-tolerant networking, or DTN."

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