Interplanetary Networks: Architectural Analysis, Technical Challenges and Solutions Overview

Future space exploration missions will need a robust, efficient and flexible communication infrastructure. This implies new communications and networking challenges, which are the ones of the so called InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet. In that framework, the paper provides a description of the challenging scenario, surveys its technical problems and envisages possible advanced communications and networking solutions starting from the analysis of a specific IPN architecture, which represents the main contribution of the work.