[Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"

[Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"

[Dave Taht]

It looks like an "internet" in space is shaping up. In a much earlier
thread on this list, there was a presentation about the moon<->earth
architectures and standards being sorted out. It was an awful looking
amalgam of every technology we have available today from lte to wifi
to the bundle protocol and everything in between. I can't find the
site that pointed at the specs now (?)

Right now it's reminding me of the bad ole days, where you'd find me on

..leo!LunarGW!rhysling_crater!dtaht.

And then there's this that went by yesterday:

"DIU’s hybrid space architecture would use commercial communication
systems as transport pipes to move data collected by imaging
satellites and deliver it quickly to government users. The concept
assumes that commercial satellites will talk to each other via
interoperable links.

Shimmin said his office awards contracts to commercial companies with
incentives that “gently encourage different vendors to cooperate
together.” By doing that, “we’ve created a much more collaborative
relationship with our vendors.”

DIU is working with the Space Force and the Air Force Research
Laboratory on the hybrid architecture. The project is intended to
support Pentagon efforts to connect ground, air, maritime and space
systems, a concept known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or
JADC2.

The backbone of the hybrid network will be DoD’s Transport Layer, a
constellation to be deployed by the Space Development Agency, he said.
“We want to augment it with the commercial communications
architectures that are coming online to proliferate the internet in
space, get every satellite talking to every other satellite, relaying
through ground stations regardless of who owns the ground stations,
they should all function as routers.”

The thinking in JADC2 is “to embrace multiple providers so we don’t
have a single point of failure,” said Shimmin. "


https://spacenews.com/starlinks-market-dominance-affecting-dods-hybrid-network-plans/



-- 
This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC

Re: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"

[David P. Reed]

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Ah, hell. DoD ain't the ARPA of the '70's. The Beltway Bandits aren't gonna build any friggin' fairy Internet. Nope, Space calls for John Wayne-style Gold Plated designs. No COTS architecture is relevent to "space, the final frontier".
 
This is gonna be pure "5G" (the protocol stack of that name, requiring algorithms of that name).
Because, after all, Space Force wants to argue to control a bigger budget and develop its own unique "Space Transport" system.
 
Now that is sarcastic, but since I was involved in the rationale for the Internet *in the ARPA concept*, and know Vint and Bob's mandate, I think it will turn out to be more true than not.
 
The reasons the branches of DoD cannot interoperate their networks is basically caused by "contracting out" based on bids with specifications that allow each vendor to throw non-interoperable features into the mix, so that they lock in DoD to lots of incompatible technology. The bureaucrats (Admirals, Generals, Colonels, and civilian agency staff) only get to "review proposals" for "complete systems".
 
The most recent example of such a fiasco I happened to get close to was the attempt to modernize the radio "waveforms" (really protocols) of DoD spectrum. OMG. What a procurement nightmare. The clear career path of those in charge of procurement was to "retire" and go to work for the winning contractors as employee or consultant to the sales process.
 
A less recent example was when services came in Iraq when it was learned that systems never interoperated - why? Well, some young officers in their "spare time" hacked together a system called RIPRNET, which was basically the Internet architecture using cheap COTS walkie-talkies as links that bypassed all the gold plated but isolated tech. (and of course the robots deployed in Iraq spoke IP, as well).
 
Is this "corrupt"? No, it's just profit maximizing for the vendors. Free market if you don't plan for what will be needed.
 
There certainly won't be any "open source licensing" on any software here. The trivial argument that the Chinese will infiltrate the design is a pocket veto.
 
The real question is why doesn't this  network get built using IPv6 transport? It would certainly be a lot cheaper and it would work from day one. Ask your Congressional representatives, why? But having worked on the FCC TAC and so forth, as well as dealing with some smart folks in DoD over the years (like Vint and Bob, but also Admiral McMullen, and John McCain's staff) the technolobbyists have already circulated bogus technical reasons why the Internet cannot work in Space. Is there an Internet in Star Trek? Well, that proves it then! There are lots of consultants who worked for proprietary gear vendors who will write impressive but obscurantist technical papers to argue that the Internet architecture can't work at all in Space. And Congressional staffers who are "in on the con" will wave those papers around.
 
How did we get the Internet? NOT because DoD spec'ed it into contracts for DoD procurement. Nope, a small group invented internetworking as a universal *overlay* at the lowest levels of hardware, and paid BBN and some universities to demonstrate how to make it work. That was cheap - not the kind of money that a "real" Space Force must spend!
 
 
> Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 06:59:46 -0700

> From: Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>
> To: Dave Taht via Starlink <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Subject: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"
> Message-ID:
> <CAA93jw6RReXwaa0DvfkXNnHjfzxv+3th2p7qygEwd98srLgiZw@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> 
> It looks like an "internet" in space is shaping up. In a much earlier
> thread on this list, there was a presentation about the moon<->earth
> architectures and standards being sorted out. It was an awful looking
> amalgam of every technology we have available today from lte to wifi
> to the bundle protocol and everything in between. I can't find the
> site that pointed at the specs now (?)
> 
> Right now it's reminding me of the bad ole days, where you'd find me on
> 
> ..leo!LunarGW!rhysling_crater!dtaht.
> 
> And then there's this that went by yesterday:
> 
> "DIU’s hybrid space architecture would use commercial communication
> systems as transport pipes to move data collected by imaging
> satellites and deliver it quickly to government users. The concept
> assumes that commercial satellites will talk to each other via
> interoperable links.
> 
> Shimmin said his office awards contracts to commercial companies with
> incentives that “gently encourage different vendors to cooperate
> together.” By doing that, “we’ve created a much more
> collaborative
> relationship with our vendors.”
 
[DPR] contract requirements create collusion among winners, not interoperability or inexpensive upgradeability. There's a better strategy. Not that I can be heard on this, I suspect even Vint can't be heard on this:
Mandate that Internet Architectures MUST be used unless a panel of independent scientists who have no financial or careerist conflicts can be convinced it can't work.
Mandate the End-to-end argument be used to place functionality at the "edges" where updates can be incrementally made without changing the underlying transport at all.

> 
> DIU is working with the Space Force and the Air Force Research
> Laboratory on the hybrid architecture. The project is intended to
> support Pentagon efforts to connect ground, air, maritime and space
> systems, a concept known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or
> JADC2.
> 
> The backbone of the hybrid network will be DoD’s Transport Layer, a
> constellation to be deployed by the Space Development Agency, he said.
 
[DPR] Oh great, a proposal to scrap all of the past and replace it with a grand unified theory of the future that will have to completed 100% before it can be tested. This may seem like the Internet, but in fact, the Internet was the opposite - a modest proposal that could be tested from day 0.

> “We want to augment it with the commercial communications
> architectures that are coming online to proliferate the internet in
> space, get every satellite talking to every other satellite, relaying
> through ground stations regardless of who owns the ground stations,
> they should all function as routers.”
> 
> The thinking in JADC2 is “to embrace multiple providers so we don’t
> have a single point of failure,” said Shimmin. "
 
[DPR] Conflating multiple providers with fault tolerance is a terrible mistake. It's not the use of multiple providers that creates the fault tolerance of the Internet Architecture. It's that it *doesn't matter if a provider doesn't deliver a packet*. That's not a procurement issue, but a routing issue. That is, you don't start by choosing providers. You start by ignoring providers proposals. Instead you create an overlay that is provider independent, specify it, and then accept bids to extend the overlay more broadly.
 
> 
> 
> https://spacenews.com/starlinks-market-dominance-affecting-dods-hybrid-network-plans/
>
[DPR] C'mon. Starlink doesn't have "market dominance" in any market. It may have more satellites in space, but that's because satellites are a dime a dozen. DoD clearly hasn't looked at the space communications issues. SpaceX may have launch capability market dominance.
 
> 
> 
> --
> This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC


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Re: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"

[Dave Taht]

Dear David:

Would it cheer you up any to learn, that 15+ years after the debate
over UWB ended, that it's finally seeing FAR more
major uptake and reasonable standardization, and actual working chips?

It did me. I was pretty scarred by that mess also, and what was it?
the 272 notches the FCC demanded be cut out of it, which swamped
circuit design capabilities at the time... but not as bad as you.

I didn't know until recently that it had hit iphones in 2019. and was
part of the airtags, nor that the baseline latency on the things was
50us, with admittedly only a 1000 bit payload - Still crippled as to
distance, and total bandwidth to under 10mbits, but, power usage is
*amazing*.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband

The SPARK chips in particular have a nice looking devkit.

Anyway... just as the swamp of ipx and non-interoperable email systems
finally died...

You can't in the end, keep a good idea down. Maybe on average it takes
25 years to settle on saner things.

... We have centuries to sort the solar system's internet out, and the more
we can do to convince the next generation as to the right principles
to apply to it, the better.

Re: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"

[David P. Reed]

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Hi Dave - 
 
Well, you may not be happy with my response, but I think my views below are likely to play out in some form that is pretty predictable. I think it will be a bad result in Space. (The idea of Space being "free" is very unlikely to occur, just as unlikely as the current Internet was to happen in 1975.)
 

> Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 12:31:35 -0700
> From: Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>
> To: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@deepplum.com>
> Cc: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> Subject: Re: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"
> Message-ID:
> <CAA93jw4bZBDf3jJ-dboBbf9PS2TsYYJhW+myWHNUdOt7CJqWTw@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> 
> Dear David:
> 
> Would it cheer you up any to learn, that 15+ years after the debate
> over UWB ended, that it's finally seeing FAR more
> major uptake and reasonable standardization, and actual working chips?
>
[DPR} not that much cheered up, actually. While that disaster around UWB got me interested in how the politics worked, that isn't what depressed me. I won't be cheered up until the FCC stops treating the spectrum like property and started basing its decisions on achieving fully scalable wireless networking. UWB doesn't address that issue. It's unscalable for the same reasons - the misunderstanding of information theory and physics of propagation that remains endemic in the whole framework of spectrum "property rights". 

> It did me. I was pretty scarred by that mess also, and what was it?
> the 272 notches the FCC demanded be cut out of it, which swamped
> circuit design capabilities at the time... but not as bad as you.
> 
> I didn't know until recently that it had hit iphones in 2019. and was
> part of the airtags, nor that the baseline latency on the things was
> 50us, with admittedly only a 1000 bit payload - Still crippled as to
> distance, and total bandwidth to under 10mbits, but, power usage is
> *amazing*.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband
> 
> The SPARK chips in particular have a nice looking devkit.
> 
> Anyway... just as the swamp of ipx and non-interoperable email systems
> finally died...
> 
> You can't in the end, keep a good idea down. Maybe on average it takes
> 25 years to settle on saner things.
 
It's taken over 50, and counting, for the FCC to acknowledge that co-channel signalling actually works, because in digital systems we have channel coding since Shannon first wrote about information theory. And that is only the beginning of what is wrong with the "property" model, which assumes all wireless signals require a perfectly clear channel.
 
The FCC still doesn't acknowledge that Cooperative signalling protocols can create huge capacity gains, or that it's possible that multiple co-channel signals can actually create channel capacity that grows with the number of antennas (as long as modest cooperation is ensured).
 
The FCC still doesn't acknowledge that the Internet is a unifying "service" that obviates almost all of the concepts of "allocating spectrum" to "services". (they still treat Broadcast services separately from telephony, and telephony separately from Land Mobile, etc.) So, for example, Emergency Communications is regulated as if the Internet cannot be utilized, as just one example. In other words, to a thoughtful communications engineer, the FCC is a joke.
 
Mostly this is due to two factors. 1. Property rights creates opportunity for scarcity based monopoly to be granted by the government to its friends. 2. The folks who have demonstrated these technologies (using information theory and propagation physics and internetworking of wireless nets) are paid entirely by the would be monopolists (what used to be called "The Phone Company", the evil conspiracy of The President's Analyst, which you might have seen). The FCC is a captured regulator. And its role, sanctified by Congress is to create siloed monopolies. Not for the public good, but for the control of communications and enrichment of the controllers.

> 
> ... We have centuries to sort the solar system's internet out, and the more
> we can do to convince the next generation as to the right principles
> to apply to it, the better.
 
I don't think the World Radio Conference (which manages all RF services in the world, including the US), even has thought about Space, but to be honest, what they want is to control all Space communications on behalf of all governments, most of which derive substantial revenue by blocking innovative new ideas.
 
I am sad that is true, but it is almost certainly gonna happen. The DoD will play the same role it did with radio in the beginning of the 20th century, buying up all the patents, blocking any new entrants, and eventually creating RCA, a monopoly on all radio technology. That will almost certainly happen to the Solar System's communications (and property rights on messages from the earth to asteroids will be *owned* by some company, backed by the coercive power of the governments colonizing space).'

> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Subject: Digest Footer
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> End of Starlink Digest, Vol 19, Issue 7
> ***************************************
> 

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Re: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"

[Bruce Perens]

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On the other hand, people have been lecturing me about cognitive radio
since 1980, and it still doesn't work. FCC is pretty good about handing out
special testing authority if you want to _actually_demonstrate_something_.
Rather than theorize. It gets you a _lot_ farther when you ask for spectrum
and rule changes.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 9:14 PM David P. Reed via Starlink <
starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> Hi Dave -
>
>
>
> Well, you may not be happy with my response, but I think my views below
> are likely to play out in some form that is pretty predictable. I think it
> will be a bad result in Space. (The idea of Space being "free" is very
> unlikely to occur, just as unlikely as the current Internet was to happen
> in 1975.)
>
>
>
> > Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 12:31:35 -0700
> > From: Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>
> > To: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@deepplum.com>
> > Cc: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > Subject: Re: [Starlink] The DoD "Transport Layer"
> > Message-ID:
> > <CAA93jw4bZBDf3jJ-dboBbf9PS2TsYYJhW+myWHNUdOt7CJqWTw@mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Dear David:
> >
> > Would it cheer you up any to learn, that 15+ years after the debate
> > over UWB ended, that it's finally seeing FAR more
> > major uptake and reasonable standardization, and actual working chips?
> >
>
> [DPR} not that much cheered up, actually. While that disaster around UWB
> got me interested in how the politics worked, that isn't what depressed me.
> I won't be cheered up until the FCC stops treating the spectrum like
> property and started basing its decisions on achieving fully scalable
> wireless networking. UWB doesn't address that issue. It's unscalable for
> the same reasons - the misunderstanding of information theory and physics
> of propagation that remains endemic in the whole framework of spectrum
> "property rights".
>
>
> > It did me. I was pretty scarred by that mess also, and what was it?
> > the 272 notches the FCC demanded be cut out of it, which swamped
> > circuit design capabilities at the time... but not as bad as you.
> >
> > I didn't know until recently that it had hit iphones in 2019. and was
> > part of the airtags, nor that the baseline latency on the things was
> > 50us, with admittedly only a 1000 bit payload - Still crippled as to
> > distance, and total bandwidth to under 10mbits, but, power usage is
> > *amazing*.
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband
> >
> > The SPARK chips in particular have a nice looking devkit.
> >
> > Anyway... just as the swamp of ipx and non-interoperable email systems
> > finally died...
> >
> > You can't in the end, keep a good idea down. Maybe on average it takes
> > 25 years to settle on saner things.
>
>
>
> It's taken over 50, and counting, for the FCC to acknowledge that
> co-channel signalling actually works, because in digital systems we have
> channel coding since Shannon first wrote about information theory. And that
> is only the beginning of what is wrong with the "property" model, which
> assumes all wireless signals require a perfectly clear channel.
>
>
>
> The FCC still doesn't acknowledge that Cooperative signalling protocols
> can create huge capacity gains, or that it's possible that multiple
> co-channel signals can actually create channel capacity that grows with the
> number of antennas (as long as modest cooperation is ensured).
>
>
>
> The FCC still doesn't acknowledge that the Internet is a unifying
> "service" that obviates almost all of the concepts of "allocating spectrum"
> to "services". (they still treat Broadcast services separately from
> telephony, and telephony separately from Land Mobile, etc.) So, for
> example, Emergency Communications is regulated as if the Internet cannot be
> utilized, as just one example. In other words, to a thoughtful
> communications engineer, the FCC is a joke.
>
>
>
> Mostly this is due to two factors. 1. Property rights creates opportunity
> for scarcity based monopoly to be granted by the government to its friends.
> 2. The folks who have demonstrated these technologies (using information
> theory and propagation physics and internetworking of wireless nets) are
> paid entirely by the would be monopolists (what used to be called "The
> Phone Company", the evil conspiracy of The President's Analyst, which you
> might have seen). The FCC is a captured regulator. And its role, sanctified
> by Congress is to create siloed monopolies. Not for the public good, but
> for the control of communications and enrichment of the controllers.
>
>
> >
> > ... We have centuries to sort the solar system's internet out, and the
> more
> > we can do to convince the next generation as to the right principles
> > to apply to it, the better.
>
>
>
> I don't think the World Radio Conference (which manages all RF services in
> the world, including the US), even has thought about Space, but to be
> honest, what they want is to control all Space communications on behalf of
> all governments, most of which derive substantial revenue by blocking
> innovative new ideas.
>
>
>
> I am sad that is true, but it is almost certainly gonna happen. The DoD
> will play the same role it did with radio in the beginning of the 20th
> century, buying up all the patents, blocking any new entrants, and
> eventually creating RCA, a monopoly on all radio technology. That will
> almost certainly happen to the Solar System's communications (and property
> rights on messages from the earth to asteroids will be *owned* by some
> company, backed by the coercive power of the governments colonizing space).'
>
>
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Subject: Digest Footer
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Starlink mailing list
> > Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > End of Starlink Digest, Vol 19, Issue 7
> > ***************************************
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Starlink mailing list
> Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink
>


-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP

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