Abstract

The recent discovery of potentially habitable planets orbiting the TRAPPIST-1 system intensified interest in interstellar exploration. In these challenging mission concepts, communication protocols would need to cope with unprecedented signal propagation delays. In this paper, we propose and explore delay tolerant networking (DTN) technologies and analyze in a case study based on theTRAPPIST-1. Results suggests that DTN protocols features could become a valuable means to achieve data delivery in future interstellar networks.