Inter planetary internet in making

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Bangalore, Feb 20 (UNI) Spacecraft hovering around the earth will soon surf and talk with each other once the ongoing work on an Inter Planetary internet is successful.

A small group of Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) started by a team of Scientists have taken up the study with internet pioneer Vinton Cerf heading the team.

Talking to newsmen here, Dr Cerf, who is currently on a visit to Google's facilities in India, said that such a network could enable Space Scientists draw more information from the outer space and plan future launches accordingly.

The Interplanetary internet is a ''network of regional internets'' and the requirement was a standard way to achieve end-to-end communication through multiple regions in space in a disconnected, variable-delay environment using a generalised suite of protocols.

Examples of regions might include the terrestrial internet as a region, a region on the surface of the Moon or Mars, or a ground-to-orbit region.

He said that the experience gained from these experiences could be used for terrestrial applications also.

Dr Cerf, who highlighted the spread and use of internet, said that in future surfing the net through mobile phones would become popular.

''This is the only way by which internet could spread to those who are not in a position to access computers'' he said adding that currently only around one billion people use the internet and 5.5 billion of the world's population was still unconnected to it.

He said language and illiteracy pose a barrier and there was need for internet reaching out to more languages. This would hold good to India, which had 22 official languages, he added.

He said even new applications of internet evolving around mobile phones would emerge. India accounted for nearly ten per cent of the users in Asia, which, housing 56 per cent of the world's population was currently the largest internet user in the world with a figure of around 389.4 million, he added.