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Trust Vinton Cerf not to drive the Internet for communications in space as well as on terra firma.

One of the most celebrated tech architects and chief Internet evangelist, Cerf, is deep in a project not only to move the Net into outer space, but to support mobile communication in rocky terrain and adverse weather conditions.

On the lines of a sci-fi classic, a technology protocol called InterPlaNet (IPN)-short for Inter-planetary Internet — is being developed to connect links between spacecrafts on Mars to Earth. It is the result of his interest in extending the capabilities of the Internet into the Solar System which by coincidence overlapped with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)'s, Pasadena, interests in improving communication with robots in deep space. Such a collaboration has also resulted in a prototype for "Delay Tolerant Networking" (DTN) now being tested in parts of Sweden.

"We are working on standardising the protocols so that spacecrafts can communicate and share information across the solar system," Cerf said in Bangalore on Tuesday. "It will be quite valuable for mobile communication which is disruptive due to location and weather. It can be used for terrestrial operations," he added.

He anticipated further growth in Internet-enabled devices, giving examples of Net-enabled fridges, picture-frames and even surfboards. Application developers would have to come up with innovative interfaces to face up to the challenge of the small screen interface, he added.

"The Internet has grown from 22.5 million servers in 1997 to 395 million servers now. In the same time, the user-base grew from 50 million to over a billion as of January 2007," he said, adding Internet penetration is not very encouraging in India. He felt that the key to that would be to get in more locally relevant information on to the Net.

Email BR Srikanth: srikanth.r@hindustantimes.com