IMO the most likely solution to interplanetary networking is to throw tons of datacenter and compute that's anywhere more than a few light-seconds from the nearest existing datacenter, then use something along the lines of IPFS to perform data synchronization between planets.

Despite the name, IPFS has no properties that make it suitable for this application. It’s very bandwidth intensive and isn’t designed with latency or disruption tolerance in mind.

there's a lot of interesting problems just in the networking.

if it took four years for a message to cross the void from where you are to the recipient, you certainly wouldn't want to wait a full eight years to see they didn't send a receipt message and only then retransmit.

eight years is some awful latency.

you'd probably want to send each message at something like a fibonacci over the months. so, gaps of (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc) would mean sending the message on months (1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 20, 33, etc) until you got a confirmation message that they had received it. they would similarly want to send confirmations in the same sort of pattern until they stopped receiving copies of that message.

spreading the resends out over time would ensure not all of your bandwidth was going to retransmissions. you'd want that higher number of initial transmissions in hopes that enough of the message makes it across the void that they would have started sending receipts reasonably close to the four years the initial message would take to get there.

if you had the equivalent of a galactic fido-net system, it could be decades and lifetimes between messages sent to distant stars and messages sent back.

I agree! This was my obsession when I worked at JPL, unfortunately the answer was usually "no mission will sacrifice their budget for reusable assets".

You'd need a mission whose purpose is to emplace compute stations.

That's why we can't have nice things.

you'd probably want a different protocol than IPFS for that application. managing a DHT with extremely high latency isn't going to work very well. something like named-data networking would probably work better since the transmitter can know

1. exactly what prefixes need to be buffered based on the received interest messages from deep space 2. exactly which data rate is possible at any given time 3. exactly how much data needs to be sent from the buffer in each transmission

optimizing for high latency really pushes your design choices around compared to our comparatively very low latency uses here on earth. its pretty interesting to think about.

How would that work to, say, Mars? Have satellites filling many, many orbits between the two planets?

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