Communications and Architectures for Interplanetary Internet

Future space exploration missions need a robust, efficient and reliable communication infrastructure. This implies new communications and networking challenges, which are the elements of the so called Inter PlaNetary (IPN) Internet. This paper introduces the essential research challenges of the IPN environment, analyzes an envisaged IPN network infrastructure and illustrates and surveys the topological designs and solutions for IPN Backbone Network, PN Satellite Network and PN Surface Network respectively. For the heterogeneous pervasive environments, interplanetary communications challenge the development of communication technologies and ground infrastructure.