Interplanetary Networks: Architectural Analysis, Technical Challenges and Solutions Overview

Recently, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency (ESA) officials decided pursuing a mission to study Jupiter and its moons, and another to visit the largest moons of Saturn. Those missions and the future ones need a robust, efficient and flexible communication infrastructure. This implies new communications and networking challenges, which are the ones of the so called InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet.
In that framework, the paper provides a description of the challenging scenario, surveys its technical problems and envisages possible advanced communications and networking solutions starting from the analysis of a specific IPN architecture, which represents the main contribution of the work.