Spacecom

Spacecom is a field of communications that relates to transmissions through space; between planets, ships, or any combination of such. Spacecom protocols and methodologies usually focus on minimising latency and optimising for the least amount of round trips, as often the distance between nodes incurs several seconds of delay. The drawbacks of conventional spacecom systems can be avoided by the utilisation of wormhole relays, but they have their own, including an overall low throughput and an extremely high cost of operation due to power requirements scaling with physical distance.

Classes

Conventional spacecom systems are commonly divided into three classes: Class I, Class II, and Class III. Class I, the lowest, refers to communications between a planet and its moons or satellites, and is both the fastest and cheapest, with between a few seconds and a few minutes of latency. Class II includes transmissions within the same solar system, with only slightly higher costs but often up to half an hour of latency.

Class III systems reach between two solar systems, and can take multiple years to send and receive. Due to this, most interstellar communications is performed via wormhole relays; but Class III systems are still useful to transfer large packages such as videos and scientific data that relays would be incapable of handling.

Interoperability

Spacecom systems make use of heavily-specialised, aerospace-grade hardware for their actual data layer. More often than not, they rely on proprietary protocols, so an encapsulation/decapsulation processors are used to transform Internet communications into something the system understands. For example, a simple spacecom relay may only support voice calls and set-length plain text messages; the processor’s API must expose an internet interface that declares its limitations.

Specialised message buffers are also used to store text and voice messages, in order to send them in one burst and improve efficiency. This is especially critical when a Class III system is involved.

Limitations

Dealing with increased latency on the order of seconds, minutes, and even hours has created unique challenges for those who need to communicate with far away locations. Turn-based strategy computer games became adopted as the pastime of choice between planets, while the common phone call was replaced with audio, video, or text messages. Some might occasionally spend their paycheck on a minute's worth of access to a wormhole relay, in order to hear the voice of a loved one in realtime.

Network protocols increasingly shifted away to being stateless for spacecom, with compatibility layers being developed for interoperability with stateful protocols such as TCP, though Class I systems remained fast enough to permit stateful messages when configured with longer timeouts. Forward error correction was used to minimise any requirement for retransmissions. Webform Transfer Protocol (WFTP) remained ideal for spacecom applications, with its low bandwidth consumption allowing the global internet to prosper in the field of spacecom.