Being one of the industry partners in MISSION, D3TN participated in the project’s first in-person workshop at INVAP SE, San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. During the workshop and the surrounding weeks, while working in close collaboration with the project partners, we had (and will further pursue) numerous productive discussions and were able to explore new potentials for cooperation. We kindly thank the organizers, speakers, and our partners in the MISSION project for this perfect workshop and hope for the upcoming MISSION activities to be as successful and exciting!

D3TN is participating in this year’s virtual field trip of the TU Dresden Institute of Communication Technology (IfN Exkursion 2021). The event features several exciting talks from companies who offer students thesis topics and positions. Please check out the event website for more information!

After our previous tests at the end of 2020 featuring µD3TN instances on earth and one instance running on ESA’s OPS-SAT in space, we were lucky to conduct more tests over the course of four exciting days. Here is what we did: We firstly performed a “ping-pong” message exchange between a single terrestrial µD3TN instance and the one running on the OPS-SAT. After verifying that the basic scenario went smooth, we slowly introduced more and more complexity to cover more realistic use cases.

In May 2021, D3TN is offering attractive prizes for students who submit the most innovative application ideas for Delay- and Disruption-tolerant Networking (DTN) technologies. Prizes include tickets and speaker slots for the 2021 Space-Terrestrial Internetworking workshop, hoodies, as well as 1000 € for the winning team of 1-2 students. Interested? See our D3TN Inno Challenge Slide Deck for details.

GAIA-X and D3TN have a lot of core values in common. We, too, think that digital sovereignty is a goal worth to uphold and that its enabling factors like free and open source software (FOSS), open standards and open data are important. For the same reasons, we participate in groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or the InterPlanetary Networking Special Interest Group (IPNSIG) and publish our software such as µD3TN as FOSS.

Our successful field test of µD3TN conducted on the OPS-SAT last Friday was just featured on the ESA website! A huge thanks to the ESA team and all supporters of this experiment. Stay tuned!

Less than one month after the initial release of µD3TN, we had the opportunity to run a field-test on board ESA’s OPS-SAT satellite during an overflight on 11 December 2020. As part of the test, we successfully transferred Bundles between the ground and space segment. A µD3TN instance in our infrastructure exchanged Bundles via the Internet with a µD3TN instance running on the OPS-SAT. The OPS-SAT link was provided by ESOC via an SSH connection and used µD3TN’s TCPSPP convergence layer adapter.

After lots of preparations, today we can announce the first public release of µD3TN and pyD3TN! Based on the solid foundation of µPCN 0.8, these two open-source implementations of the DTN protocols will be continued with an open development approach. This means that everybody can now easily contribute to the code in the form of creating and discussing issues and proposing code changes on GitLab. In addition to the open Git repository, we provide our Python implementation pyD3TN as an easy-to-use PyPI package.

D3TN proudly announces that we get the opportunity to take part in ESA’s Special Mission Infrastructure Lab Environment (SMILE). There, we will be able to test space-to-ground communications under real conditions. We are very happy for having this opportunity to intensify our cooperation with ESA!