CLEO: Cisco router in low Earth orbit
work done with the Cisco Systems Space team, NASA Glenn Research Center, and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd at the University of Surrey.

Lloyd Wood and his colleagues argue in favor of breaking the "bent pipe" system architecture in which the satellite is seen as a relay point between two ground stations. They would add inter-satellite communication links and routers to decouple the up and downlink locations. -- Press, First Monday.

CLEO, the Cisco router in Low Earth Orbit, is a commercial Internet router launched into space and operated from orbit as a hosted payload onboard the UK-DMC(-1) satellite:

CLEO demonstrates use of the Internet Protocol in space and integration with the terrestrial Internet. The success of CLEO has led to:

And, much later, Cisco talked of protecting networks on Mars.

Here is material overviewing what CLEO is, how it was integrated into the UK-DMC satellite built by SSTL and launched into orbit, and how CLEO and UK-DMC imaging as part of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation were tested by an international collaboration of civil, commercial and military organisations in the United States, United Kingdom, and in Japan. That work with CLEO has been recognised with a number of awards and ceremonies.

CLEO is a full Cisco router running commercial off-the-shelf Cisco IOS software in orbit: OS release 12.2(11)YQ. CLEO is the first Cisco router in space. CLEO is an assembly of a Cisco 3251 mobile access router and serial card (now end of life).

CLEO has been operational in orbit for over eight years and has been tested from orbit for over four of those years. CLEO has been powered up for use more than one hundred times. Access to the CLEO router was demonstrated to the AFEI Net-Centric Operations 2005 conference (May 2005) and at the IEEE Milcom 2005 conference and exhibition (October 2005).

Slideset
A slideset summarises CLEO:

Video
Video and recordings of talks discussing CLEO are available on the video page.

Video describing the CLEO router in space and DMC satellites (ten minutes) is available.

End of operations
The UK-DMC(-1) satellite (created by SSTL), which has been joined in orbit by the later UK-DMC 2 satellite (from SSTL), has now reached the end of its operational life, but the Disaster Monitoring Constellation continues with its sister satellites:

The design of the UK-DMC satellite is discussed in:

Papers
Highlighted articles are recommended reading. For further information on the testing of the CLEO router, see:

Access to the CLEO router was demonstrated to the AFEI Net-Centric Operations 2005 conference (May 2005) and at the IEEE Milcom 2005 conference and exhibition (October 2005).

Articles and commentary
Commentary on CLEO in the blogosphere includes:

...and CLEO made Slashdot. Media coverage of CLEO includes:

Other conference papers describing work with the CLEO router in orbit include:

Papers placing the CLEO work in context:

Coverage of the launch into space:

Coverage from around the world:

...and our Internet to Orbit article is also available in Japanese and Chinese. Further information on VMOC is available.
Lloyd Wood (L.Wood@society.surrey.ac.uk)