In the future humans and robots will team together to solve NASA's science and engineering goals on planetary surfaces such as the Moon. For instance, in cases where humans and robots are building lunar structures, dynamic interaction will increase mission safety and success. Communications support, vital for command and control of operations, for coordination and scheduling of activities, and for collection, processing and returning data for processing and returning to scientists and engineers on Earth, can be provided dynamically over radio frequency technologies.

Internet-style wireless communications will be required for planetary exploration, once teams of humans and robots begin working together to solve mission objectives. Multiple planetary nodes will need to communicate in an ad hoc manner, sometimes simultaneously. As a result, a dynamic communications methodology will be required to provide planetary communications. NREN plans to meet these challenges by exploring ad hoc networking.

Flexible and dynamic planetary communications are critical to the success of NASA's vison for space exploration vision. Flexible on-site surface-to-surface communications would enable the planetary in-situ human and robotic teams to collaboratively adjust their activities based on unfolding situations. The use of surface-to-surface communications would represent a fundamental shift in communications support for NASA space missions. Consequently, NASA's traditional use of scheduled point-to-point downlinks of mission data would be enhanced with the inclusion of a local dynamic routed wireless communications architecture on the planetary surface.

A Split Design Implementation of the Dynamic Source Routing Protocol

Dynamic Source Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (DSR)

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET)