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2004 NEWS AND HIGHLIGHTS
10.05.04 - Ad Hoc Routing Protocol Tested During Simultaneous Planetary Exploration Field Activities
In September 2004, NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division networking staff simultaneously supported the 2004 Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS) field exercise in Meteor Crater, Arizona and the Mars Analog Research and Technology Experiment (MARTE) field exercise near the Rio Tinto River in southwestern Spain. The primary networking research aspect of these field outings was the testing of nomadic networking technologies, which will be critical components of future planetary exploration communications systems. In particular, the Arizona team conducted preliminary tests of the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) ad hoc routing protocol, using a DSR implementation developed by Toung.
Customary communications support, provided by the NAS team of Larry Chao, Ray Gilstrap, Steve Shultz, Thom Stone, and Jerry Toung, included connectivity between the Arizona site and NASA centers, connectivity between multiple sites in Spain, Internet telephony (VoIP), and performance monitoring using the ARC-developed PCMon tool. During the two field activities, a team member in Spain dialed the four-digit VoIP extension to reach a team member in Arizona so that they could compare the progress of their respective experiments.
The Desert Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS) team, led by NASA Johnson Space Center, conducts a series of field activities to develop equipment and protocols to support planetary surface exploration. This is the second time that NAS has participated in a Desert RATS activity. The primary science objective of the 2004 outing was testing a new astronaut spacesuit and an upgraded science trailer to transport instruments. The scientific objective of the MARTE activity is to develop techniques for drilling, sample handling, and instrumentation that can be used in the search for subsurface life on Mars.
DSR enables mobile ad hoc network devices (or nodes) to communicate with each other without the need for a pre-existing network infrastructure or administration. As new nodes appear or disappear, the software makes nodes aware of that dynamic topology and lets them self-organize and self-configure. DSR was first implemented under FreeBSD release 3.3 as an all-in-the-kernel solution, making it difficult to use. Toung's implementation is done as a kernel-loadable module, which can be loaded or unloaded dynamically-one part of the software runs in user space and the other in kernel space. This split design makes the software easier to use and install, easier to troubleshoot, and easier to modify and enhance. The DSR software implementation developed by Toung adheres to the current specifications presented in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet-Draft, "The Dynamic Source Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (DSR)."
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NEWS ARCHIVE
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