Interplanetary File System (IPFS) will be used in an effort to speed up communications over long distances.
Today, the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) in orbit will be deployed as part of a pioneering effort, according to the Filecoin Foundation (FF). The LM 400 Technology Demonstrator spacecraft from Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) will carry out the mission in 2023.
Prior to this, FF and Lockheed Martin revealed in May 2022 in Davos that they were working together to deploy IPFS in space as a means of accelerating data transmission across great distances. By taking the advantages of decentralised storage to space and investigating use cases for how IPFS may improve interplanetary communication and data transport, this mission is the next stage in that endeavour.
The evaluation of in-space use cases for decentralised storage is being done on this mission for the first time. It will be housed on the independently financed LM 400 Technology Demonstrator by Lockheed Martin, a software-defined satellite about the size of a refrigerator that can support a variety of clients and missions. Once the spacecraft is in orbit, it will upload and carry out the IPFS demonstration using its SmartSatTM software-defined satellite technology.
The mission will showcase an IPFS use case for space-to-ground communication. Through the use of IPFS, data from space will be “content-addressed” and made accessible on the IPFS network. Applications using IPFS will be able to retrieve the data without having to know the precise position of the ground station hosting the data from the IPFS network.
A decentralised protocol called IPFS is used to store and share data, and it uses content-addressing to identify files in a certain way. The Filecoin network, a decentralised storage network fueled by cryptocurrencies, is built on the IPFS protocol. Space-to-space communication is one of several use cases, architectures, and topologies for which the IPFS software layer is intended to be useful. The software is being developed publicly under an open-source licence.
