Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Season greetings and end of the year update

As 2022 ends I wanted to provide a year end update and a short summary of what transpired during this year, both for the IPN DTN Lab project and IPNSIG in general.

The prototype lab grew from a handful of nodes to about 50 now, of which 30 are running NASA’s JPL ION 4.1.1, two are under test with NASA’s GRC HDTN, and another two are under test with µD3TN

IPN DTN Lab Network Topology

One node running Linux on a mini PC is 100% dedicated to monitor the network and serves as a workstation running WireShark for deep packet inspection.

Zabbix Network Monitoring

It is still very much work in progress, for additional visualization of telemetry data and monitoring, and some control functions, one of the Ubuntu Linux nodes is running NASA’s AMES OpenMCT, which is a web-based framework for mission operations data visualization currently in use by various NASA missions.

NASA OpenMCT

One of the challenges for the project, besides being 100% self-funded, was procurement of additional Single Board Computers like the Raspberry Pi that are in very high demand and very low supply.

I was able to find several suitable alternatives at reasonable prices, some with better performance and specs than the Raspberry Pi.

Various SBCs under test

This triggered a sub-project to test and evaluate building ION on up to 16 different platforms, which generated some contribution to fix a runtime issue when building it for 64 bits platforms. I posted a pair of articles with the specs of the Single Board Computers I tested.


Platforms tested with NASA's JPL ION 4.1.1

I started some preliminary tests with various wireless technologies such as LoRa, Cellular LTE/5G like T-Mobile's Edge, and low orbit nano satellites like Swarm M138 (now owned by SpaceX.) I will have more activity on this front during 2023.

Wireless modems for IoT

During 2022 I focused mostly on getting the hardware platform stable and functional, including putting together several designs with Lego for the mockups that have embedded several of the DTN nodes. 

NASA DSN Control Room Lego Mockup

I still need to gather some additional parts to put together a model of the Orion capsule.

Very impressed and happy with the successful completion of the Artemis 1 mission, it provided many additional images from all angles of the capsule, so I may review a little bit the design before getting the missing parts, but it looks something like this (I’m using Brick Link Studio for the designs.)

NASA Orion Capsule Lego Mockup

I already have a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W running ION that will get embedded in the model and on which I will venture to build another open source package from NASA called Core Flight System or cFS.


I hope to have enough time and inspiration to create more documentation, post additional articles and videos, and be available for open discussions about these technologies on a new reddit community I created recently.

Several presentations, videos, and a draft paper are also in the works.

It has been also a very busy year for the Internet Society’s InterPlanetary Networking Interest Group also known as IPNSIG. From its inception in the late 1990’s it grew up to more than 900 members around the world.


Like many organizations like Internet Society, ICANN, IETF, etc, IPNSIG is also evolving, during this year we transitioned from being a Special Interest Group to an Internet Society Chapter, the Internet Society Inter Planetary Chapter, first of its kind. In 2022 IPNSIG was incorporated as a non-profit organization in the State of California. For now, we will keep the IPNSIG acronym and domain name. 


We have several working groups, since last year I’ve been involved with the PWG or Pilot Projects Working group where we are working on various R&D projects to contribute to the development and testing of the technologies associated with Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking and its applications both terrestrial and in space.


We had a great deal of engagement with NASA and ESA, expecting more interaction with other space agencies. At one of the workshops gathering several NASA research centers working on DTN, we were able to present IPNSIG and our projects group.

Click on image for YouTube full video

We are very much engaged with the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF, I’m an active member of the DTN Working Group where we work on the standardization of the associated protocols related to DTN.

IPNSIG has been also very active organizing several webinars that we call the “IPNSIG Academy.” This initiative was launched in February, we already had eight talks. One of our webinars was dedicated to present some of the activities of the Pilot Projects Working Group.

Click on image for full video

There is much more to share, one of our members (Scott Johnson) added IPv6 as an option for transport layers for ION, another of our members (Samo Grasic) developed a preliminary Convergence Layer Adapter for the use of a LoRa modem via UART. 

We are also cooperating with the original author of ION, former NASA JPL Engineer Scott Burleigh in the coming release early next year of IONe (e for experimental) as a separate code branch, with several improvement, fixes and add-ons. 

Alberto Montilla and Alberto Montilla Ochoa of SPATIAM Corporation developed a DTN Manager being used to manage an IPNSIG Test Network, and performed interoperability tests between ION and µD3TN.


At IPNSIG we expect a very active 2023 as we are starting to engage with various initiatives in the private, commercial and educational sectors.

Now that I have a more stable hardware platform for the lab, one of my resolutions for 2023 is to invest more time on mission simulation, documentation and reach out.


That is all for now, hoping you had a Merry Christmas and wishing y’all a great start for 2023.

Until the next intergalactic communication …

Cheers
Jorge


Monday, November 28, 2022

NASA’s JPL ION Running on yet another Single Board Computer

As I keep getting them and going through my old inventory of development boards, I test if I can build and run NASA’s ION open source DTN implementation without issues and updating my list.

This time is for the RADXA ROCK3 Model A, adding it to the list I published before.

Once again, if you are a manufacturer or distributor of these type of boards and have interest to get it tested and added to the list, please feel free to send a message to ipndtn@ljcv.net.


RADXA ROCK3 Model A

 


SoC

Rockchip RK3568

CPU

Quad Cortex-A55 ARMv8

Clock

2GHz

Video

HDMI

RAM

4GB LPDDR2

LAN

GigE

USB

2 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0

WiFi

(optional)

Bluetooth

(optional)

Supported OS

Debian, Ubuntu


Disclaimer: I’m not getting any compensation or benefits from any distributor or manufacturer for the products mentioned in this article.


Until the next intergalactic communication …

Cheers
Jorge

Thursday, November 3, 2022

NASA’s JPL ION Running on Single Board Computers (SBC)

Since the moment I envisioned the project to create a prototype for a R&D and education laboratory for DTN (Delay Tolerant Networking) and IPN (InterPlanetary Networking,) I set as one of my primary requirements to make it affordable and as simple as possible using off the shelf components.

I could have used a large server with multiple virtual machines, but the idea was to embed some of the nodes into a mockup representing a different element of a space mission network. I ended doing that using Legos, in some cases modifying existing models, in others just creating my own like the Mission Control Center (with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W.)


Besides some nodes that I already planned to run on a virtual machine, and others running on actual Intel based mini personal computers, I focused my search on affordable Single Board Computers (or SBC) that could run NASA’s JPL open source ION implementation of DTN.

Of course, the Raspberry Pi ended on top of the list, more so when they released the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with comparable performance of a Raspberry Pi 3.

Why Raspberry Pi?

Price and features were a big factor, plus the ecosystem that has developed over 10+ years around it, particularly for education and experimenting, has an incredible value.

I considered other alternatives, I already had some boards in my inventory, and another goal for the laboratory was to serve as a platform to test interoperability of ION running on different platforms.

Unfortunately, with the semiconductor shortages and supply chain issues, the Raspberry Pi boards by the end of 2021 were almost impossible to procure or at exorbitant prices.

Then, the alternatives became more important.

I started procuring some that were reasonably priced, with similar features as the Raspberry Pi, most of them with ARM cpus, and very important, with support for a flavor of Lunix where I could build ION from the source code.

Overall, I didn’t find many problems to build ION, in few cases I had to tweak the original config scripts.

These changes will be included in the coming release early next year of IONe, an experimental version of ION as a branch of the original NASA code, development still leaded by Scott Burleigh (creator of ION when he worked at JPL) and as part of the work we do with the Internet Society Interplanetary Chapter (IPNSIG) Projects Group.

I also started to run performance tests to compare various boards/platforms. I will publish the results in a separate article, preliminary numbers show that the alternative boards to Raspberry Pi run substantially faster.

If you are a manufacturer or distributor of these type of boards and have interest to get it tested and added to the list, please feel free to send a message to ipndtn@ljcv.net.

I’ve been already sharing this information with various universities and research groups who are facing the same problem getting appropriate hardware for their projects. I heard that some of the Raspberry Pi products have a lead time of over a year!! Insane

Here are the boards I tested up to the publication of this article.

Raspberry Pi 3B

 


SoC

Broadcom BCM2837

CPU

Quad Cortex-A53 ARMv8

Clock

1.2GHz

Video

HDMI

RAM

1GB LPDDR2

LAN

100M

USB

4 x USB 2.0

WiFi

b/g/n

Bluetooth

LE

Supported OS

RaspiOS, Ubuntu, Kali Linux …


Raspberry Pi 3B+

 


SoC

Broadcom BCM2837B0

CPU

Quad Cortex-A53 ARMv8

Clock

1.4GHz

Video

HDMI

RAM

1GB LPDDR2

LAN

GigE

USB

4 x USB 2.0

WiFi

b/g/n/ac

Bluetooth

4.2, LE

Supported OS

RaspiOS, Ubuntu, Kali Linux


Raspberry Pi 4B

 


SoC

Broadcom BCM2711

CPU

Quad Cortex-A72 ARMv8

Clock

1.5GHz

Video

2 x microHDMI

RAM

1, 2, 4 or 8GB LPDDR4

LAN

GigE

USB

2 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 4.0

WiFi

b/g/n/ac

Bluetooth

5.0, LE

Supported OS

RaspiOS



Raspberry Pi Zero W

 


SoC

Broadcom BCM2835

CPU

Single ARM1176JZF-S

Clock

1GHz

Video

Mini HDMI

RAM

512MB LPDDR2

LAN

None

USB

1 x OTG

WiFi

b/g/n

Bluetooth

4.1, LE

Supported OS

RaspiOS



Raspberry Pi Zero 2W

 


SoC

RP3A0 (Broadcom BCM2710A1)

CPU

Quad Cortex-A53 ARMv8

Clock

1GHz

Video

Mini HDMI

RAM

512MB LPDDR2

LAN

None

USB

1 x OTG

WiFi

b/g/n

Bluetooth

4.2, LE

Supported OS

RaspiOS


Orange Pi PC

 


SoC

Allwinner H3

CPU

Quad Cortex-A7

Clock

1.6GHz

Video

HDMI

RAM

1GB LPDDR3

LAN

100M

USB

2 x USB 2.0, 1 x OTG

WiFi

None

Bluetooth

None

Supported OS

Ubuntu, Debian Buster


Banana Pi M2 Zero

 


SoC

Allwinner A7H2+

CPU

Quad Cortex-A7

Clock

1.2GHz

Video

Mini HDMI

RAM

512MB LPDDR2

LAN

None

USB

1 x OTG

WiFi

b/g/n

Bluetooth

4.0

Supported OS

Debian Buster


Banana Pi M4

 


SoC

Realtek RTD1395

CPU

Quad Cortex-A53

Clock

1.4GHz

Video

HDMI

RAM

1GB LPDDR4

LAN

100M

USB

4 x USB 2.0

WiFi

b/g/n/ac

Bluetooth

4.2

Supported OS

Debian Buster


Libre ComputerAML-S905X0-CC aka Le Potato

 


SoC

Amlogic S905X

CPU

Quad Cortex-A53

Clock

1.512GHz

Video

HDMI

RAM

2GB LPDDR3

LAN

100M

USB

4 x USB 2.0

WiFi

None

Bluetooth

None

Supported OS

Ubuntu, Debian & Raspbian Bullseye


Libre Computer ROC-RK3328-CC aka Renegade

 


SoC

Rockchip RK3328

CPU

Quad Cortex-A53

Clock

1.4GHz

Video

HDMI

RAM

2GB LPDDR4

LAN

GigE

USB

1 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0

WiFi

None

Bluetooth

None

Supported OS

Ubuntu, Debian & Raspbian Bullseye


Note: on the "Supported OS" I'm showing the ones I tested, for some of the boards there are other OS available.

Disclaimer: I’m not getting any compensation or benefits from any distributor or manufacturer for the products mentioned in this article.

Until the next intergalactic communication …

Cheers
Jorge