Event
ECE Distinguished Colloquium Speaker Series - Edward Birrane, JHU APL
Friday, September 6, 2024
3:30 p.m.
Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building, Room 1110
Darcy Long
301 405 3114
dlong123@umd.edu
Speaker: Edward Birrane, Chief Engineer, Space Networking
Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Lab
Title: Building the Solar System Internet: Resiliency and Automation for Delay-Tolerant Networks
Abstract: Interplanetary Networks are being designed to enable communications across astronomical distances. These networks will be challenged by latencies and disconnectivities at scales that break traditional networking algorithms. In some cases, the sources and destinations of messages may not exist in the IPN at the same time. In other cases, there might never be a simultaneous set of links making a path between the two. Therefore, novel networking algorithms are necessary to construct time-variant paths from predicted sets of future, ephemeral link opportunities called contacts.
New protocols and algorithms for security, management, and routing must be developed as we build the next generation of networks that will not only instrument and connect the most remote regions on Earth, but also enable the coming age of humanity's exploration of our solar system.
This talk will highlight some of the major challenges of interplanetary-scale networks, current engineering and research work in space networking, and how NASA, with other space agencies, is building a networked Lunar environment as a first step towards a networked solar system.
Bio: Dr Birrane is a computer scientist and embedded software engineer who focuses on the adaption of networking protocols for use in non-traditional networking environments. He has supported a variety of embedded software engineering efforts, to include the NASA New Horizons mission to explore the Pluto-Charon system and the NASA Parker Solar Probe mission to observe the outer corona of our sun. He works with industry, government, and academia on the design and development of protocols to implement the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture.
Dr. Birrane co-chairs both the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) and Time-Variant Routing (TVR)working groups within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and is a member of multiple space system security working groups for the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS), the Interagency Operations Advisory Group (IOAG), and NASA’s governance committee for lunar networking. He is an author of BPv7 (RFC 9171), BPSec (RFC 9172), and the default security contexts for BPSec (RFC 9173) and an author of the textbook “Securing Delay-Tolerant Networks with BPSec”.
He is a member of the principal professional staff at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory where he serves as Chief Engineer for Space Networking. He is also an adjunct professor of computer science at both the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the Johns Hopkins University.
