Interplanetary Internet Architecture, Addressing, and Routing#

Wesley Eddy – Aalyria

• Why: IP to the Moon and Mars is actually standardizing (IETF TIPTOP working group), and the design constraints — extreme delay, scheduled connectivity, disconnection — produce routing and addressing ideas you won't see anywhere else.
• What: An architecture for IP-based networks spanning Earth and Lunar/Mars domains (draft-ietf-tiptop-ip-architecture). Surprisingly, modern IP stacks mostly work at lunar delays — the IETF 124 hackathon ran Discord, Slack, Apple Messages, YouTube, and web browsing at lunar RTTs, and simulated pings to Voyager distances; QUIC's tunability is a key enabler. Addressing is genuinely contested: IPv6, blocks per planet, one RIR or many, aggregation encouraged, and "who defines the list of planets?" (mirrored in ARIN's TIPTOP policy draft ARIN-2026-1). Routing is "scheduling, scheduling, scheduling": PCE-like centralized computation of time-varying routes distributed to nodes well in advance, with inter-domain time-varying BGP as a someday problem; temporospatial SDN (Aalyria's Spacetime, grown from Loon's aerospace mesh code) is the current exemplar, plus Outernet Council federation interfaces for multi-operator systems.
• How: Architecture summary plus active IETF/ARIN policy threads.
• Where applicable: No near-term operational relevance, but the scheduled-intermittent-connectivity routing concepts echo terrestrial challenged networks — and the speaker's signoff ("hope to see you at SSNOG") tells you where the community thinks this goes.