Hops are artificial, as long as you are 100% sure you’re not introducing loops you can just tell routers not to decrease the TTL and they’ll be invisible.

It’s just that if you do that and you do introduce a loop the packets will keep looping and the network will very quickly overflow.

You can tunnel though, so the actual amount of hops could be infinite. Routers can also rewrite the field.

And just like NAT with IPv4, we will use hacks to get around implementing a proper solution for decades (and counting).

With satellite internet taking off, and actual interest in extraterrestrial colonies from e.g. NASA and SpaceX, I think we need a proper space communication protocol. Maybe it can all be solved in L2, but I think we will soon be looking at 255 hops the way we look at the limited address space of v4.

It seems people are working on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

Interesting (but probably not too surprising) to see that DTN research is alive and kicking!

I wrote a short seminar paper on DTN protocols as an undergrad in '09, so thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Thanks for posting this, reading about all the progress made with delay tolerant networking is exciting!