Networking with extremely high latency.

Question

Are there any protocols, systems, etc. experimental or otherwise designed for allowing normal (as normal as can be) network operations (E-mail, DNS, HTML, etc.) over very high latency links? I'm thinking of minutes to an hour, or maybe two. Think light speed lag at a solar system scale.

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As a side note: research or speculation on the social effects hour to day scale communication delays would be interesting. Current trends tend towards delays of seconds to minutes (plus however long it takes people to notice your e-mail) and pre-phone times tended towards days to weeks but I can't think of anything with minimum time delays in the range of hours.

Answer 1

From tcp_timer.c:

     /* Increase the timeout each time we retransmit.  Note that
      * we do not increase the rtt estimate.  rto is initialized
      * from rtt, but increases here.  Jacobson (SIGCOMM 88) suggests
      * that doubling rto each time is the least we can get away with.
      * In KA9Q, Karn uses this for the first few times, and then
      * goes to quadratic.  netBSD doubles, but only goes up to *64,
      * and clamps at 1 to 64 sec afterwards.  Note that 120 sec is
      * defined in the protocol as the maximum possible RTT.  I guess
      * we'll have to use something other than TCP to talk to the
      * University of Mars.
      *
      * PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once
      * implemented ftp to mars will work nicely. We will have to fix
      * the 120 second clamps though!
      */

PAWS?

Answer 2

You might be interested in the Interplanetary Internet concept. One possible underlying technology would be Delay-Tolerant networking, for which there are a couple of published RFCs: RFC 4838 and RFC 5050.