Note: this posting was our contribution to April fools day!
If you want to know more about the real thing take a look over here
Counting and identifying objects. Most people take these for granted, just counting upwards, dolling out unique IDs to everything they bump into, as if numbers were unlimited. In the computer network world, we don't have that luxury.
We long ago decided that 4 bytes (our “digits”) was enough to identify anything that could ever be made. Then, well, along came consumer internet devices and now the world needs IPv6: 16 digital digits of uniqueness. After we crunched the numbers we found, not only does the earth need IPv6, so does the moon!
To celebrate the return of the warm weather,
we're giving a peek into our networking plans:
IPv6 and beyond!
First, with 16 byte addressing, we'll finally be able to uniquely identify each of our rovers, all of our landers, and do so on every launch. When you add up the manpower required to rewrite and debug a similar protocol for this fleet size, we're saving enough time and money to fund another launch. Bound by secrecy agreements, I can say only these words about fleet size and let the astute reader fill in the blanks: nano-bots, orbiters, observatories, satellites, communication relays, parachutes.
Second, with 16 byte addressing, our communication packet payloads can be smaller and still fit into standard error correction checks. Without this larger header, our commands would be larger and more likely to suffer bit errors. Initial rough calculations show that with the 4x greater header size, we can get 4x fewer bit errors in our commands. Fewer bit errors would allow us to use cheaper and smaller satellite dishes. The benefits of this new technique for reliable communication are endless.
Lastly, our R&D department is still running the math, but we have two really wild ideas:
* The 16 byte IPv6 address gives us about 10^38 unique addresses. That's very close to what a traditional 4-byte floating point number can give. Yes, you've guessed it: we going to use the IPv6 header networking hardware as a floating point coprocessor! Every gram saved of launch weight greatly improves our lead.
* Lunar Geo Positioning. The moon has a surface area of 3.793x10^7 km^2. With 10^38 unique addresses, we can divide the surface of the moon into 3.793x10^19 individual square millimeter patches and still be able to give unique IDs to up to 2.64x10^18 grains of dust in each patch. With this kind of scientific data volume, you can really see why we need to ensure our communication commands are as error free as possible.
Well, that concludes our R&D peek into IPv6.
We'll have updates soon, you can count on it!
